Is PowerShell ready to replace my Cygwin shell on Windows

Question

I m debating whether I should learn PowerShell  or just stick with Cygwin Perl scripts Unix shell scripts  etc   The benefit of PowerShell would be that the scripts could be more easily used by teammates that don t have Cygwin  however  I don t know if I d really be writing that many general purpose scripts  or if people would even use them   Unix scripting is so powerful  does PowerShell come close enough to warrant switching over   Here are some of the specific things  or equivalents  I would be looking for in PowerShell    grep sort uniq Perl  how close does PowerShell come to Perl s capabilities   AWK sed file  the command that gives file information  etc

User · Accepted Answer

Tools are just tools   They help or they don t   You need help or you don t   If you know Unix and those tools do what you need them to do on Windows - then you are a happy guy and there is no need to learn PowerShell  unless you want to explore    My original intent was to include a set of Unix tools in Windows and be done with it  a number of us on the team have deep Unix backgrounds and a healthy dose of respect for that community    What I found was that this didn t really help much  The reason for that is that AWK grep sed don t work against COM  WMI  ADSI  the Registry  the certificate store  etc   etc   In other words  UNIX is an entire ecosystem self-tuned around text files  As such  text processing tools are effectively management tools  Windows is a completely different ecosystem self-tuned around APIs and Objects  That s why we invented PowerShell   What I think you ll find is that there will be lots of occasions when text-processing won t get you what you want on Windows  At that point  you ll want to pick up PowerShell  NOTE - it is not an all or nothing deal  Within PowerShell  you can call out to your Unix tools  and use their text process or PowerShell s text processing   Also you can call PowerShell from your Unix tools and get text   Again - there is no religion here - our focus is on giving you the tools you need to succeed  That is why we are so passionate about feedback  Let us know where we are falling down on the job or where you don t have a tool you need and we ll put it on the list and get to it   In all honesty  we are digging ourselves out of a 30-year-hole  so it is going to take a while  That said  if you pick up the beta of Windows Server 2008  R2 and or the betas of our server products  I think you ll be shocked at how quickly that hole is getting filled   With regard to usage - we ve had   3 5 million downloads to date   That does not include the people using it in Windows Server 2008  because it is included as an optional component and does not need a download   V2 will ship in all versions of Windows  It will be on-by-default for all editions except Server core where it is an optional component  Shortly after Windows 7 Windows Server 2008 R2 ships  we ll make V2 available on all platforms  Windows nbsp XP and above  In other words - your investment in learning will be applicable to a very large number of machines environments   One last comment  If when you start to learn PowerShell  I think you ll be pretty happy  Much of the design is heavily influenced by our Unix backgrounds  so while we are quite different  you ll pick it up very quickly  after you get over cussing that it isn t Unix  -      We know that people have a very limited budget for learning - that is why we are super hard-core about consistency  You are going to learn something  and then you ll use it over and over and over again   Experiment  Enjoy  Engage

User · Answer

I have used a bit of PowerShell for script automation  While it is very nice that the environment seems to have been thought out much more than Unix shells  in practice the use of objects instead of text streams is much more clunky  and a lot of the Unix facilities that have been developed in the last 30 years are still missing   Cygwin is still my scripting environment of choice for Windows hosts  It certainly beats the alternatives in terms of getting things done

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I have only recently started dabbling in PowerShell with any degree of seriousness  Although for the past seven years I ve worked in an almost exclusively Windows-based environment  I come from a Unix background and find myself constantly trying to  Unix-fy  my interaction experience on Windows   It s frustrating to say the least   It s only fair to compare PowerShell to something like Bash  tcsh  or zsh since utilities like grep  sed  awk  find  etc  are not  strictly speaking  part of the shell  they will always  however  be part of any Unix environment  That said  a PowerShell command like Select-String has a very similar function to grep and is bundled as a core module in PowerShell     so the lines can be a little blurred   I think the key thing is culture  and the fact that the respective tool-sets will embody their respective cultures    Unix is a file-based   in general  non Unicode  text-based culture   Configuration files are almost exclusively text files  Windows  on the other hand has always been far more structured in respect of configuration formats--configurations are generally kept in proprietary databases  e g   the Windows registry  which require specialised tools for their management  The Unix administrative  and  for many years  development  interface has traditionally been the command line and the virtual terminal  Windows started off as a GUI and administrative functions have only recently started moving away from being exclusively GUI-based  We can expect the Unix experience on the command line to be a richer  more mature one given the significant lead it has on PowerShell  and my experience matches this  On this  in my experience    The Unix administrative experience is geared towards making things easy to do in a minimal amount of key strokes  this is probably as a result of the historical situation of having to administer a server over a slow 9600 baud dial-up connection  Now PowerShell does have aliases which go a long way to getting around the rather verbose Verb-Noun standard  but getting to know those aliases is a bit of a pain  anyone know of something better than  alias   where     ResolvedCommandName -eq   lt command gt        An example of the rich way in which history can be manipulated   iptables commands are often long-winded and repeating them with slight differences would be a pain if it weren t for just one of many neat features of history manipulation built into Bash  so inserting an iptables rule like the following   iptables -I camera-1-internet -s 192 168 0 50 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT  a second time for another camera   camera-2    is just a case of issuing      s -1- -2-  s 50 51  which means  perform the previous command  but substitute -1- with -2- and 50 with 51  The Unix experience is optimised for touch-typists  one can pretty much do everything without leaving the  home  position  For example  in Bash  using the Emacs key bindings  yes  Bash also supports vi bindings   cycling through the history is done using Ctrl-P and Ctrl-N whilst moving to the start and end of a line is done using Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E respectively     and it definitely doesn t end there  Try even the simplest of navigation in the PowerShell console without moving from the home position and you re in trouble  Simple things like versatile paging  a la less  on Unix don t seem to be available out-of-the-box in PowerShell which is a little frustrating  and a rich editor experience doesn t exist either  Of course  one can always download third-party tools that will fill those gaps  but it sure would be nice if these things were just  there  like they are on pretty much any flavour of Unix   The Windows culture  at least in terms of system API s is largely driven by the supporting frameworks  viz   COM and  NET  both of-which are highly structured and object-based  On the other hand  access to Unix APIs has traditionally been through a file interface   dev and  proc  or  non-object-oriented  C-style library calls  It s no surprise then that the scripting experiences match their respective OS paradigms  PowerShell is by nature structured  everything is an object  and Bash-and-friends file-based  The structured API which is at the disposal of a PowerShell programmer is vast  essentially matching the vastness of the existing set of standard COM and  NET interfaces     In short  although the scripting capabilities of PowerShell are arguably more powerful than Bash  especially when you consider the availability of the  NET BCL   the interactive experience is significantly weaker  particularly if you re coming at it from an entirely keyboard-driven  console-based perspective  as many Unix-heads are

User · Answer

As someone whose career focused on Windows enterprise development from 1997 - 2010  the obvious answer would be PowerShell for all the good reasons given previously  e g   it is part of Microsoft s enterprise strategy  it integrates well with Windows COM  NET  and using objects instead of files provides for a  richer  coding model   For that reason I d been using and promoting PowerShell for the last two years or so  with the express belief I was following the  Word of Bill    However  as a pragmatist I m no longer sure PowerShell is such a great answer  While it s an excellent Windows tool and provides a much needed step towards filling the historic hole that is the Window command line  as we all watch Microsoft s grip on consumer computing slip it seems increasingly likely that Microsoft has a massive battle ahead to keep its OS as important to the enterprise of the future   Indeed  given I find my work is increasingly in heterogeneous environments  I m finding it much more useful to use Bash scripts at the moment  as they not only work on Linux  Solaris and Mac OS X  but they also work   with the help of Cygwin   on Windows   So if you buy into the belief that the future of the OS is commoditized rather than a monopolized  then it seems to make sense to opt for an agile development tool strategy that keeps away from proprietary tools where feasible  If however you see your future being dominated by all-that-is-Redmond then go for PowerShell

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The cmdlets in PowerShell are very nice and work reliably  Their object-orientedness appeals to me a lot since I m a Java C  developer  but it s not at all a complete set  Since it s object oriented  it s missed out on a lot of the text stream maturity of the POSIX tool set  awk and sed to name a few    The best answer I ve found to the dilemma of loving OO techniques and loving the maturity in the POSIX tools is to use both  One great aspect of PowerShell is that it does an excellent job piping objects to standard streams  PowerShell by default uses an object pipeline to transport its objects around  These aren t the standard streams  standard out  standard error  and standard in   When PowerShell needs to pass output to a standard process that doesn t have an object pipeline  it first converts the objects to a text stream  Since it does this so well  PowerShell makes an excellent place to host POSIX tools   The best POSIX tool set is GnuWin32  It does take more than 5 seconds to install  but it s worth the trouble  and as far as I can tell  it doesn t modify your system  registry  c  windows   folders  etc   except copying files to the directories you specify  This is extra nice because if you put the tools in a shared directory  many people can access them concurrently   GnuWin32 Installation Instructions  Download and execute the exe  it s from the SourceForge site  pointing it to a suitable directory  I ll be using C  bin   It will create a GetGnuWin32 directory there in which you will run download bat  then install bat  without parameters   after which  there will be a C  bin GetGnuWin32 gnuwin32 bin directory that is the most useful folder that has ever existed on a Windows machine  Add that directory to your path  and you re ready to go

User · Answer

When you compare PowerShell to the combination Cygwin Perl Shell  be aware that PowerShell only represents the  Shell  part of that combination   You can however invoke any command from PowerShell just as you do from cmd exe or Cygwin  It does not re-implement the specified functions  and it is certainly not comparable to Perl   It s  just  a shell  but it makes programming easier providing a comfortable interface to the  NET universe   Also keep in mind that PowerShell requires Windows nbsp XP  Windows Server 2003 or higher  which may pose a problem depending on your IT infrastructure   Update   I had no idea what kind of philosophical debate my answer would spark   I posted my answer in the context of the question  Compare PowerShell to Cygwin and Perl and Bash   PowerShell is a shell  as it makes no syntactic difference between built-in commands  commandlets  user functions  and external commands   exe   bat   cmd   Only invoking  NET methods differ by adding a namespace or an object in the call   Its programmability derives from the  NET framework  not from anything specific to the PowerShell  language    I d say I believe PowerShell is a  scripting language  as soon as Bugzilla or MediaWiki are implemented as PowerShell scripts running on a web server     Until then  enjoy the comparisons

User · Answer

grep   Select-String cmdlet and -match operator work with regexes  Also you can directly make use of  NET s regex support for more advanced functionality      sort   Sort-Object is more powerful  than I remember  nix s sort   Allowing multi-level sorting on arbitrary expressions  Here PowerShell s maintenance of underlying type helps  e g  a DateTime property will be sorted as a DateTime without having to ensure formatting into a sortable format      uniq   Select-Object -Unique     Perl  how close does PowerShell come to Perl capabilities     In terms of Perl s breadth of domain specific support libraries  nowhere close  yet    For general programming  PowerShell is certainly more cohesive and consistent  and easier to extend  The one gap for text munging is something equivalent to Perl s    operator      AWK   It has been long enough since using AWK  must be  18 years  since later I just used Perl   so can t really comment      sed    See above      file  the command that gives file information    PowerShell s strength here isn t so much of what it can do with filesystem objects  and it gets full information here  dir returns FileInfo or FolderInfo objects as appropriate  is that is the whole provider model   You can treat the registry  certificate store  SQL Server  Internet nbsp Explorer s RSS cache  etc  as an object space navigable by the same cmdlets as the filesystem     PowerShell is definitely the way forward on Windows  Microsoft has made it part of their requirements for future non-home products  Hence rich support in Exchange  support in SQL Server  This is only going to expand   A recent example of this is the TFS PowerToys  Many TFS client operations are done without having to startup tf exe each time  which requires a new TFS server connection  etc   and is notably easier to then further process the data  As well as allowing wide access to the whole TFS client API to a greater detail than exposed in either Team Explorer of TF exe

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As my recent experiments led me into depths of PowerShell and  NET calls  I must say that PowerShell can replace Cygwin and Unix shell   I m not sure about Perl  but since both PowerShell and Perl are Turing complete as programming languages  I give this as a yes to replacing Perl too   One thing that PowerShell has above Cygwin and ordinary Bash under  nix  is its ability to perform sandboxed DLL calls  manipulating the operating system via direct API calls  WMI methods and even COM objects  How about launching Internet nbsp Explorer via code  then doing whatever you want with its displayed document  effectively emulating a back-end for a Web server   How about gathering data from SQL servers and other data providers  parse them and export as CSV  mail messages  text and actually any kind of existing and non-existing file formats   With proper skills of creating a valid file out of data received  of course  but CSV are readily available     And there is an extra security available via signed cmdlets and scripts   group policies  and execution policies that help prevent malicious code from running on your system even if you run them as administrator   About what commands are implemented - the answer by Richard lists them and PowerShell s capability of emulating their functionality already    About whether PowerShell is strong to warrant switching over - this is more a matter of personal preference  although as more and more Windows services are providing PowerShell cmdlets to control them  not using PowerShell with these services present is considered a hindrance   Hyper-V server is the primary such service  and it also provides the ability to do more with PowerShell cmdlets than with GUI    Probably this answer is five years late  but still  if someone performs administrative tasks or general scripting of various stuff on Windows  they should definitely try harnessing PowerShell for their purposes

User · Answer

I found PowerShell programming to be not worth the effort     I have several years of experience with shell scripting under Unix  but I found it enormously difficult to do much of anything with PowerShell     It seems like many functions require you to interrogate the Windows Management Interface and issue SQL-like commands to get the information you need     For example  I wanted to write a script to remove all files with a specific suffix from a directory tree   Under Unix  this would be a simple      find   -name    xyz -exec rm         After a couple of hours dicking around with Scripting FileSystemObject and WScript Shell and issuing  SELECT   FROM Win32 ShortcutFile WHERE Drive       amp  drive  amp     AND Path       amp  searchFolder  amp       I finally gave up and settled for Windows Explorer s Search command and just do it manually   There s probably some way to do what I wanted  but I didn t see anything obvious and all the examples on the MSDN site were so trivial as to be worthless   EDIT Heh  of course as soon as I wrote this I poked around some more and found what I had been missing  the -recurse option to the remove-item command is faulty  revealed if you use get-help remove-item -detailed      I had been trying  remove-item -filter     xyz  -recurse  and it wasn t working  so I gave up on it     Turns out you need to use get-childitem -filter    xyz  -recurse   remove-item

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I haven t seen that the PowerShell has really taken off  at least not yet  So it might not be worth the effort of learning it unless those others on your team already know it   For your predicament you might be better off with a scripting language that others could get behind  Perl like you mentioned  or others like Ruby or Python   I think a lot of it depends on what you need to do  Personally I ve been using Python for my own personal scripts  but I know when I start writing something that I ll never be able to pass it on - so I try not to do anything too revolutionary

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TL DR -- I don t hate Windows or PowerShell  I just can t do anything in Windows or on PowerShell     I personally still find PowerShell underwhelming at best    tab completion of directory paths do not compound  requiring the user to enter a path separator after every name completion  I still feel like Windows doesn t even have the concept of a path or of what a path is  with no accessible user home indicator    short of some  environment   somejibberish  user home  NTFS is still a mess and seemingly always will be  Good luck navigating  cmd-esque interface  The dinosaur cmd exe is still visible in PowerShell  Edit  rarr  Mark still being the only way to copy information  and copying only in the form of rectangular blocks of visible terminal space  and Edit  rarr  Mark still being the only way to paste strings into the terminal  Painting it blue doesn t make it any more attractive  I don t mind Microsoft developers having a taste in color though  Windows always opens at top left corner of screen  For somebody who uses vertical task bars this is incredibly annoying  especially considering that the Windows task bar will cover the only corner of the window that gives access to copy paste functionality    I can t speak much on the grounds of the tools Windows includes  Being that there is a whole set of open-source  freely licensed CLI tools  and PowerShell ships with  to my knowledge  none of them is an utter disappointment    PowerShell s wget takes seemingly incomparable arguments to GNU wget  Thanks  glimmer of hope portably-useless  PowerShell POSIX is not Bash-compatible  particularly the  amp  amp  operator is not handled  making the simplest of conditional command following not a thing    I don t know man  I gave it a shot  I really did  I still try to give it a shot in the hopes that the next time I open it it will be any less useless  I cannot do anything in PowerShell  and I can barely do things with a real project to bring GNU tools to Windows   MySysGit gives me the dinosaur cmd exe prompt with a couple of GNU tools  and it is still very underwhelming  but at last path completion works  And the Git command will run in Git Bash   Mintty for MySysGit gives the Cygwin interface over mysysgit s environment  making copy and paste a thing  select to copy  mouse   Shift Ins to paste  how modern      However  things like git push are broken in Mintty   I don t mean to rant  but I still see huge problems with command-line usability on Windows even given tools like Cygwin     P S   Just because something can be done in PowerShell  doesn t make it usable  Usability is deeper than ability and is what I tend to focus on when trying to use a product as a consumer

User · Answer

In a couple of lines  Cygwin and PowerShell are different tools however if you have Cygwin installed you can run the Cygwin executables within a PowerShell session  I ve gotten so used to PowerShell that now I no longer use grep  sort  awk  etc  There are pretty much built-in alternatives in PowerShell  and if not you can find a cmdlet out there    The main tool I find myself using is ssh exe  but within a PowerShell session   It works great

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I am not a very experienced PowerShell user by any means  but the little bit of it that I was exposed to impressed me a great deal  You can chain the built-in cmdlets together to do just about anything that you could do at a Unix prompt  and there s some additional goodness for doing things like exporting to CSV  HTML tables  and for more in-depth system administration types of jobs   And if you really needed something like sed  there s always UnixUtils or GnuWin32  which you could integrate with PowerShell fairly easily   As a longtime Unix user  I did however have a bit of trouble getting used to the command naming scheme  and I certainly would have benefitted more from it if I knew more  NET   So essentially  I say it s well worth learning it if the Windows-only-ness of it doesn t pose a problem

User · Answer

You can also try running Bash scripts on Windows using BashWin at  https   github com skanga BashWin

User · Answer

PowerShell is very powerful  more powerful than the standard built-ins of the Unix shells  but only because it includes much of the functionality usually shelled out to subprograms   Also  consider that you can write applets in any  NET language  including IronPython  IronRuby  PerlNet  etc   or you can simply call your Cygwin commands from PowerShell  ignoring all the extra functionality and it will work similarly to Bash  KornShell  or whatever

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If you like shell scripting you will love PowerShell   Start at A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell  Ars Technica

User · Answer

Why not use both  Call PowerShell scripts in Cygwin just like any other interpreted scripts like Perl  etc   I do this enough that I wrote https   bitbucket org jbianchi powershell for a Bash wrapper to call powershell exe in Cygwin  It can be used as a shebang as the first line of a powershell exe  ps1 script  since PowerShell also uses     as a comment   See https   bitbucket org jbianchi powershell wiki Home for examples

User · Answer

There are lots of great great answers here  and here is my take  PowerShell is ready if you are    Examples   grep    Select-String -Pattern   sort    Sort-Object   uniq    Get-Unique   file    Get-Item   cat    Get-Content   Perl AWK Sed are not commands  but utilities hence hard to compare  but you can do almost everything in PowerShell

[unix] Is PowerShell ready to replace my Cygwin shell on Windows?

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