[OT] Any opionions on Power Shell?

William O'Higgins Witteman william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Tue Jan 20 05:03:51 UTC 2009


On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:46:06PM -0500, Paul King wrote:

>I have recently discovered that, as early as 2006, M$ Windows decided to give 
>up the ghost and implement a UNIX-emulating shell called power shell for the 
>purpose of "serious" system administration. 

--snip--

>Anyone tried this shell? Any comments on it?

I have not spent any real time with it, because (thankfully) I no longer
have to make a Windows machine do any real work.  That said, I did a lot
of reading as it was being developed under the name Monad, and I did
some testing when it was still in beta.

It came into being because systems administrators cannot do anything
complex to hundreds or thousands of machines under their care with a GUI
- it is just ludicrous.  Microsoft needed to support a server
farm/cloud/datacentre play that was actually maintainable, and everyone
they talked to told them that that needed to be a shell.

The basic functionality is very BASH-like, but the real value is in the
hooks built into the major OS features and the native servers -
specifically OS configuration, Exchange, IIS and MSSQL
automation/adminstration.  What makes me deeply ill is the syntax for
these hooks - hugely long, CamelCased, impossible to memorize strings
that essentially demand that you develop in Visual Studio.

If I had to make Windows do anything more complicated than boot I'd be
using it, but it is not, IIRC, installed in the non-server versions of
Windows.
-- 

yours,

William

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