Is PowerShell ready to replace my Cygwin shell on

Question

I'm debating whether I should learn PowerShell, or just stick with Cygwin/Perl scripts/Unix shell scripts, etc.

The benefit of PowerShell would be that the scripts could be more easily used by teammates that don't have Cygwin; however, I don't know if I'd really be writing that many general purpose scripts, or if people would even use them.

Unix scripting is so powerful, does PowerShell come close enough to warrant switching over?

Here are some of the specific things (or equivalents) I would be looking for in PowerShell:

• grep
• sort
• uniq
• Perl (how close does PowerShell come to Perl's capabilities?)
• AWK
• sed
• file (the command that gives file information)
• etc.

Answer 1

There are lots of great great answers here, and here is my take. PowerShell is ready if you are... Examples:

grep = "Select-String -Pattern"

sort = "Sort-Object"

uniq = "Get-Unique"

file = "Get-Item"

cat = "Get-Content"

Perl/AWK/Sed are not commands, but utilities hence hard to compare, but you can do almost everything in PowerShell.

Answer 2

grep

Select-String cmdlet and -match operator work with regexes. Also you can directly make use of .NET's regex support for more advanced functionality.

sort

Sort-Object is more powerful (than I remember *nix's sort). Allowing multi-level sorting on arbitrary expressions. Here PowerShell's maintenance of underlying type helps; e.g. a DateTime property will be sorted as a DateTime without having to ensure formatting into a sortable format.

uniq

Select-Object -Unique

Perl (how close does PowerShell come to Perl capabilities?)

In terms of Perl's breadth of domain specific support libraries: nowhere close (yet).

For general programming, PowerShell is certainly more cohesive and consistent, and easier to extend. The one gap for text munging is something equivalent to Perl's .. operator.

AWK

It has been long enough since using AWK (must be >18 years, since later I just used Perl), so can't really comment.

sed

[See above]

file (the command that gives file information)

PowerShell's strength here isn't so much of what it can do with filesystem objects (and it gets full information here, dir returns FileInfo or FolderInfo objects as appropriate) is that is the whole provider model.

You can treat the registry, certificate store, SQL Server, Internet Explorer's RSS cache, etc. as an object space navigable by the same cmdlets as the filesystem.

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PowerShell is definitely the way forward on Windows. Microsoft has made it part of their requirements for future non-home products. Hence rich support in Exchange, support in SQL Server. This is only going to expand.

A recent example of this is the TFS PowerToys. Many TFS client operations are done without having to startup tf.exe each time (which requires a new TFS server connection, etc.) and is notably easier to then further process the data. As well as allowing wide access to the whole TFS client API to a greater detail than exposed in either Team Explorer of TF.exe.

Answer 3

PowerShell is very powerful, more powerful than the standard built-ins of the Unix shells (but only because it includes much of the functionality usually shelled out to subprograms). Also, consider that you can write applets in any .NET language, including IronPython, IronRuby, PerlNet, etc.. or you can simply call your cygwin commands from PowerShell, ignoring all the extra functionality and it will work similarly to bash, korn, or whatever...

Answer 4

I have used a bit of PowerShell for script automation. While it is very nice that the environment seems to have been thought out much more than Unix shells, in practice the use of objects instead of text streams is much more clunky, and a lot of the Unix facilities that have been developed in the last 30 years are still missing.

Cygwin is still my scripting environment of choice for Windows hosts. It certainly beats the alternatives in terms of getting things done.

Answer 5

I haven't seen that the PowerShell has really taken off, at least not yet. So it might not be worth the effort of learning it unless those others on your team already know it.

For your predicament you might be better off with a scripting language that others could get behind, Perl like you mentioned, or others like Ruby or Python.

I think a lot of it depends on what you need to do. Personally I've been using Python for my own personal scripts, but I know when I start writing something that I'll never be able to pass it on - so I try not to do anything too revolutionary.

Answer 6

As someone whose career focused on Windows enterprise development from 1997 - 2010, the obvious answer would be PowerShell for all the good reasons given previously (e.g., it is part of Microsoft's enterprise strategy; it integrates well with Windows/COM/.NET; and using objects instead of files provides for a "richer" coding model). For that reason I'd been using and promoting PowerShell for the last two years or so, with the express belief I was following the "Word of Bill."

However, as a pragmatist I'm no longer sure PowerShell is such a great answer. While it's an excellent Windows tool and provides a much needed step towards filling the historic hole that is the Window command line, as we all watch Microsoft's grip on consumer computing slip it seems increasingly likely that Microsoft has a massive battle ahead to keep its OS as important to the enterprise of the future.

Indeed, given I find my work is increasingly in heterogeneous environments, I'm finding it much more useful to use Bash scripts at the moment, as they not only work on Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X, but they also work—with the help of Cygwin—on Windows.

So if you buy into the belief that the future of the OS is commoditized rather than a monopolized, then it seems to make sense to opt for an agile development tool strategy that keeps away from proprietary tools where feasible. If however you see your future being dominated by all-that-is-Redmond then go for PowerShell.