I’m not looking forward to picking up a script from someone who never learned the UNIX way and wasted all that time typing “Get-Selection” or whatever else Microsoft decided to name some command to make it really-really-really long.

Lastly, I wish they could support CRLF and just CR EOLs. The computer doesn’t care, so why do all the text-based programs on Windows care still?

None of this is meant as a put down towards Powershell – just a few observations.

OR, for more complete processing,

get-command | measure

however for the command count thing i’d go with this:

$commands = get-command
$commands.length

or more concisely how about
$(get-command).length

get-command | WHAT THE FIRK DO I PUT HERE?

in unix it would be: ls /usr/bin | wc -l

in Powershell, you have to know a billion frikking options and dash this and dollar underscore that before you get something simple like commanline.

Microsoft has NEVER thought of commandline as the first class citizen and it still shows. MS people are going gaga over this because they have never felt the power of the unix commandline.

I can have a regular user be productive with a subset of unix shell commands.

in Powershell, either you’re a hotshot VB / .Net programmer (in which case you know the object hierarchy) or you’re screwed!

Tell me how I count th number of commands outputted by get-command?

is this get-command -text output -count ?

nope

is this get-command | get-count?

nope

WTF is it?

thats like saying Unix copied punch cards…or IBM terminals

you need to input things into a computer…a black screen with a promt is the easy way to do it. The features of the UNIX command shell are standard routines a computer should be able to do….

BASH (most popular unix around right now) has less features then windows powershell.

the only main problem is with job control, but they are adding that in with powershell 2.0


(
echo "Foos and bars:"
(
foo | foo2 | foo3 > foo.out &
bar | bar2 > bar.out &
wait
)
sort foo.out bar.out
) | baz2 | ... &


… etc. works wonders for running times.

I am now working at Microsoft, and I do a lot of stuff with powershell. As far as Cygwin or JPSoft stuff being “way better” I’ll have to disagree:

* Powershell is much more powerfull: it doesn’t work on text streams, like unix shells. It (only) works on objects. So input/output pipelines are all .NET objects.

* Powershell, as language is much more expressive then any UNIX shell, period. The closest thing that can match it is Perl 6 or Ruby.

* For Windows scripting, it is the best choice because its specifically made for it. Its tied into Windows (registry, etc).

* It has built-in aliases for most common UNIX commands (ls, cat, ps … etc), so you don’t have to get used to Windows cmd.exe command alternatives. If you just open powershell terminal you should feel right at home!

Check out PowerTab sometime …

-Dmitry

There’s also IronPython which was just released not too long ago. With it, you can access all of .NET, WMI, and even interface with PowerShell through a Python environment.

4NT or TakeCommand is new information for me. I was only aware of Cygwin which a quite good choice…

I am downloading 4NT/Take Command 30 days trial. We might end up purchasing few copies :)

Appreciate your post!

1] JPSofts 4NT or TakeCommand. They’re pretty expensive @ US$75 each, but I’ve been using 4NT for a dozen years or more and would be lost without its power. http://www.jpsoft.com

2] Lately though I’ve become a real Cygwin addict. It’s a bit tricky to set up, but it is a very active group and they do a bang-up job of keeping the environment Linux compatible, right down to the latest controversial change where Bash doesn’t like CR/LF, just like on Linux:-) http://www.cygwin.com