this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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I see Powershell as a nuclear bomb. It is extremely powerful and complex and barely anybody uses it because of it.
Isn't powershell just bash but for windows?
Powershell is so much more than bash, not in a derogatory way.
It's a full fledged object oriented programming language, and it's written in .Net I believe. You can integrate tons of plugins to manage your whole infra (exchange, Cisco, AD, VMware etc), just from the Powershell shell.
I hate it because it's slow, clunky and overly complex for its prime use, which is scripting.
Yes and no. They serve roughly the same purpose.
I actually hated Powershell until I was forced to work on some automation scripts with it and realized that it's actually pretty cool.
Bash is good for quickly doing something in the terminal but for longer script files I prefer PS now. It feels much more modern and has a less janky syntax.
Funnily enough the reason I had to use it was to make my scripts cross platform between osx, linux and windows.
People tend to hate on PowerShell but it's cross-platform these days, and far easier to write than shell scripts once you understand the syntax.
You can pipe objects between functions, rather than just string streams like in Bash. Often there's no
cut
,sed
,grep
, etc needed as what you want is probably a property on an object.It's not just a basic scripting language like Bash. It's built on top of .NET, so most of things you can do in C#, you can also do in PowerShell (and if not, you can call into C# code).
It's especially popular for administration of Windows systems - if there's anything you want to do on a Windows system, it's likely there's a PowerShell module for it.
Whether it's pulling AD/O365 objects for security analysis, or SSH into a network appliance, PowerShell is a handy little tool. It's everything we used to use CMD for and more.
Some old-school Windows sysadmins are still holding on to VBScript and batch files for automation, but I think most have switched over to PowerShell. Definitely a useful tool.
Barely anybody uses it? Maybe on the dev side. Cloud and Data engineers use it all the time.