In the comments section of a recent post I found out that Windows PowerShell had been ported to Linux. Had no clue it was a thing.
Went looking and found this old article attempting to explain why they did it. Not remotely interested in giving up Bash for PowerShell, but I thought it was interesting enough to share. The article seems to be from 2016.
I have never been more tempted to check the NSFW box, but I’ll leave it open for now unless a mod complains. :-D
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)
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.
Select-StringIt’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.