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I've heard a lot of good things about it, mainly from people used to CMD though. When I checked it out, I didn't find a lot to do with it. I didn't feel like learning a new shell language that only works on Windows. The lack of familiar helper tools such as diff, grep and sed didn't help, and I don't know whatever Windows equivalents may exist. I'm sure if I was using Windows PWSH would be great, but like many of us I don't have any interest in using Windows as a webserver platform.

Now that there may be a prospect of using PowerShell on other platforms, I wonder why I'd bother? Day to day tasks I'm perfectly happy doing in bash, and anything more complex, I'd just as soon use Python, Ruby, PHP or Perl.




grep is Select-String

diff is an alias for Compare-Object so if you tried it, you should have seen it do something. But unlike actual diff it operates on objects rather than files, so you need to gc (Get-Content) the files you want to compare.

sed/awk: string manipulation is built-in to PowerShell, but sed's in-place file editing is replicated by piping Get-Content into Set-Content. Sometimes more verbose, sometimes not.

I personally don't see what value PowerShell would bring to other platforms, given they already have huge swathes of scripts written in well-developed (or at least well-discussed) languages and command-line tools for system administration are plentiful. But why would you bother using Perl when you already have Ruby? Obviously some people will take the choice if they know it.




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