this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
133 points (97.2% liked)
Linux
7497 readers
272 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system
Also check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Powershell is annoyingly good though.
Can someone explain to me why? The outputs are objects and that is cool for scripts, but the fact that every small thing is its own cmdlet is super annoying. I can do everything in Linux if I know 10 commands. In PS I would always have to look up everything.
That sounds more like a clash of cultures than a real problem. In Linux you need to know 10 options and possibly subcommands for each command. Naturally the same concept has different flags, and the same flag has different meanings in different commands. Is that really better?
If I recall the Verb-Noun idea is supposed to make it clear what is happening, take a look through stuff like the approved verbs for defining cmdlets. There's aliases and stuff for sure for example I think ls is an aliases for Get-ChildItem in PowerShell.
It's supposed to make it so you don't necessarily need to look things up, need to do something to an item? Well you can Copy, Remove, Rename, Move etc, and while yeah that's a super basic example that you know the equivalent linux commands for, the concept is supposed to apply everywhere. Now, whether or not people follow the guidelines is probably another story.
I don't really hate shell scripting, feel like they all have their place, complex stuff though is nicer in straight PowerShell than bash IMO, but I'm fine using either.
The aliases are good for the most part, but
curlis an alias forInvoke-Webrequest, even though the two are incompatible.Same here. I keep hearing that Powershell is so good, but I have to look up every little thing. It's all too specific and you can't remember it all.
I wouldn't go that far
As much as I hate windows powershell is actually decent.
The problem is that on Linux it competes with bash and dozens of way better terminals.
We're not talking terminals, though, are we? You can run pwsh in dozens of terminals. As a shell, it's... Very decent.
I've been a Linux sysadmin for decades and Windows for the year 8 years or so. I started using Windows with an air of contempt, and still do. I hate myself for saying this, but Powershell is better than bash. Bash is very limited if you consider only bash. For bash to be useful you need the entire GNU suite with grep, cut, awk etc.
That's like saying that your car is very limited because you need cylinders, spark plugs, oil filters...
Well yeah, you do and typically that comes with the car, just like grep comes with bash
But that's almost never how a system is configured. The entire point is that bash, zsh, fish etc. can make use of those utilities. You don't need bash trying to reinvent everything. You don't want that. That's why changing shells is generally painless and a strength, not a weakness.
Yes, that's the point of the shell. It's the glue for all the little tools.
So you’re saying Powershell doesn’t uphold Unix Philosophy and thus shouldn’t be used?
PowerShell actually does uphold the Linux philosophy pretty well. Most functions are in modules that can be imported, disabled or swapped out as appropriate.
PS looking good
I hate to say it, but powershell is better than bash.
I'll take your word for it. I could never wrap my head around PowerShell back when I still had a Windows install. Whenever I could, I would use either the DOS prompt or WSL/Ubuntu. I may not be great at Bash or DOS but at least I'm not having to resort to cargo culting to do anything. Probably a sign I'm getting old.
there are other shells that have all the nice powershell things without the weird stuff (at least for not windows people), like nushell
although I wouldn't be surprised if powershell was the thing that started the trend of better shells
TIL. Looks like I will be installing Nushell. This is neat. Especially how everything returns the final value.
Random question for everyone from a bit of a noob. When I'm using Powershell (PS) in windows I can start to type the name of a built in command or one I have added to PATH and then press tab to auto complete the command. That part works the same in my Linux terminal.
What I can also do after I have typed that command into PS is start to type a file name that exists in the directory that PS is working in and then press tab to auto complete or cycle through the files that match and it even formats the name of the file correctly (meaning if it has a space in the name it will wrap the name in quotes so that it is understood by the commands they are fed to). This auto completing of file names even works on files that were created after the PS window was opened. This functionality doesn't seem to exist by default in any distro I have used. Is it possible to do this in the Linux terminal?
Although I have done some distro hopping, most of them have ultimately been Ubuntu based. Currently running Kubuntu.
By default Bash will auto complete filenames (In fact, in 25 years, i can't remember the time bash didn't). Sometimes, there are autocomplete 'helpers' that try to be overly smart (ie, only autocompleting files that have the right extension, which can interfere when you are doing creative things with mis-named file). However, in Powershell, cmdlets declare a type for each of their parameters, which lets powershell autocomplete the right type of item, which can make it a bit more magical and reliable.
I mean, I'm not a big fan of bash, the most likely default shell, so my advice would be to explore some alternate shells.
I am a little surprised completions aren't working in bash by default, but yeah idk if it's possible to get the cycling through suggestions. double tap tab and it should at least list the options though.
I'd recommend you hop between some shells and see what you like. most distros tend to keep the default shell pretty vanilla, the most change you'll get is maybe zsh with some nicer defauls.
nushell is great and would be my first recommendation. everything is structured like powershell, but way less verbose and more emphasis on integrating the existing cli ecosystem than pwsh's commandlets for everything.
fish or oh-my-zsh are things other people recommend. you don't get structured data but they do give a better completion experience and other nice things
I want to like xonsh, and used it for a few years, but it has the same problems pwsh has with separate ecosystems of structured commands and unstructured text. if you're a python person though I'd consider it too though.
Slow as shit though.
The blue powershell window is for me, but running powershell.exe in conhost, or windows terminal is fast enough.
What do you mean? If you run
powershelldirectly it opens up either inconhostor Windows Terminal, depending on whatever is your default, doesn't it? Unless you mean PowerShell ISE or whatever it's called.I mean running it directly shows up in the ugly blue window, and that's slower in my experience.
No grep though as far as I could find... There was a similar cmdlet IIRC, but it was extremely limited and didn't work well (this was years ago though)
It’s really useful too. You can either pipe in text or for example Get-ChildItem a directory of files and it will parse them all. As usual it returns a helpful object with properties like line number.
The idea with powershell isn't to be a text parser - so grep doesn't really work. When you pass things through pipes, it's a full object with multiple properties, and those you can filter with either simple expressions like
select-object [-property]or with more complex expressions: https://4sysops.com/archives/add-a-calculated-property-with-select-object-in-powershell/Fair, but very very very often (unless you are a full time daily user of the commandlet and all objects you may run into or have a photographic memory) you don't know the actual specific property or object exact verbatim and have to rely on a very quick search to remember that one object you used 3 months ago once that you need now for example. Or you want to see where/if something is referenced in another subset of programs like a specific IP, another program, a resource taken up, etc...
That is mostly what grep is used for: discovery and reference, which powershell I don't think has a substitute for so instead you have to sort through documentation and forums.
Not trying to be difficult, but that's what
get-memberis for - it'll dump all the properties for a given object.I get it - it's way different from bash - speaking as someone who has been using Linux since Debian Hamm. Side note, net installers over dialup really sucked.
I was originally forced to use powershell when I joined up with a virtualization team for work and they used PowerCLI.
It was bonkers how easy it was to get reproducible scripts bundled up for the more junior engineers.