Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I can see a lot of similar cases especially for sysadmin things (systemctl, ifconfig, etc.).

One thing that was nice about my adopting Powershell as my daily shell is that for the most part, I could just use the same shell utilities as usual:

  getent passwd | cut -f6 -d':' | sort | uniq -c

Like, there's no problem running that in powershell. I know people have talked about "mixing" strings and objects but, I have to say that for me I've rarely run into a problem with it?

As you learn you can do a little more. Maybe you learn that group (group-object) can be used instead of the two commands at the end:

  getent passwd | cut -f6 -d':' | group

And for me, the nice thing is that when you learn something like that, it's leverageable across all your cases. You learned something about your tool, not just about the passwd file.

Is this better than bash? I don't think it's worse:

  getent passwd | %{ ($_ -split ':')[5] } | group

But then you might notice that your data is a CSV (C for colon in this case) and you might leverage some of the CSV-handling which works well in Powershell:

  getent passwd | convertfrom-csv -del ':' -h 'user','pwd','uid','gid','comment','home','shell' | group -prop 'shell'

Now you're cooking with structured data again. I think familiarity makes this kind of thing come naturally. And since these commands are pretty discoverable, because they're more consistent, and tab-completion and command-line editing are so much better than bash. It's easy to see how the above can be made terser by stashing it into utility function or a hashtable in your profile (e.g. so you could do "getent passwd | fields passwd" or something like that.

Now, I'm not going to tell someone it's worth the growing pains and adjustments to switch. It's like switching keyboard layouts. And matters of taste might turn you off, understandable. But for me there have been real benefits, and on its merits, I do think it makes a better shell. And it would be nice (from my perspective) if the community did some more work around these use cases and making them nicer for people.

user:	partdavid
created:	May 14, 2008
karma:	375