“Why use bash when you have PowerShell?” <– words I did not expect to hear from my own mouth.
Over the past few weeks I’ve begun learning PowerShell, and it’s an improvement over the UNIX (and family) shells, bash and ksh etc.
PowerShell is newer. It builds on what those shells did right, and then gets it more right.
The UNIX-y shell commands have this magical power of composition: you can pipe the output of one to the input of another, and chain these to build tiny programs right on your command line. One sends text to STDOUT, the next reads it on STDIN.
PowerShell does this piping, except with objects instead of lines of text. The data is structured and interrogable (I can ask it what fields it has). In bash, you output your data as text, and the next program parses that text.
Here’s an example from Chapter 1 of PowerShell in Action. In bash, the sort command can parse the piped text and sort on it. You can specify numeric sorting.
In PowerShell, the sort command works on named properties of the piped object. And it knows the type of the property, so nobody has to tell it what’s a number.
More: PowerShell standardizes parsing of command-line arguments. This gives me consistency when I use the command, and saves painful work when I write a command.
More: PowerShell gives me multiple output paths, one for data (to the next program) and another to the user who typed the command. In bash, commands like git abuse STDERR to send info back to the user.
When PowerShell was only for Windows, by far the most powerful command-line shell for me was bash (or fish or zsh, pick your favorite). Bash worked in the worlds I lived in, and that matters most. Now that PowerShell runs on Mac and Linux, it is the most powerful command-line shell for me … except for one thing.
The biggest thing bash has on PowerShell is: I already know bash. I can type stuff there and it just works. With PowerShell I have to look things up all the time.
But every time I look something up, I increase my abilities. PowerShell raises the floor I build on, compared to bash.
It is always a tradeoff between sharpening the tools we have, vs trading them in for a better model. In this case, I’ll take some slowness in the beginning for a faster top speed.
By switching, I gain advantages that the software world has created since I started programming twenty years ago. I rebase myself on the latest version of the world.