I’m not sure I could cope with that. I have enough problems with it on windows. Literally every corner you turn something punches you in the balls or turns to dust in your hands. It’s one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever used and I avoid it where I can.

I would not invite it onto a *nix machine voluntarily where there are established patterns and solutions which have matured over the space of 40 odd years now.

Where does that happen for you?

In my experience with PowerShell on Windows, you have to approach it more like interactive python with shortcuts rather than a regular shell, and once you’re accustomed it works fine. The main issue is that it doesn’t work like a classic shell, it just has some affordances to look like a classic shell in common use cases.

Well it’s not the concept but the implementation that is at fault. From persistent random WinRM failures, sudden things breaking and the whole thing wrapping rancid bits of WMI and COM which leak through regularly, it’s just pain. On top of that the interface is somewhat flakey and slow. Plus some of the semantics feel like going back to circa 1995 Perl. Oh and don’t get me started on the nightmare that is script signing and security which really does nothing useful other than get in the way.

It really feels immature.

The biggest travesty is when it is integrated into something else such as ansible, packer, chocolatey etc where it will cost you a couple of days occasionally due to some obscure issue hidden behind even more layers.

It's weird but once you get used to it I think it's cool. No more text munging!

Agreed; it's a lot more like a really weird iPython than it is a drop-in bourne shell replacement with quirks.

Ya I use cygwin where I can, many of the reinventions don't improve usability.

I use powershell on linux occasionally. Primarily with the azure and powercli modules. For doing vmware and azure stuff I can't think of anything that hasn't worked.

If you want to do anything that would be windows only then you're right, it probably won't work.

That said, I usually have a tmux window ssh'd into a windows machine for powershell. It would be nice to be able to manage ad and exchange from a linux machine with powershell.

Invoke-WebRequest most certainly runs on linux.

This comment made me go and try out Invoke-WebRequest because I'd forgotten what it was like.

Being able to do simple web scraping like this in a "shell" is pretty great:

    $hn = Invoke-WebRequest https://news.ycombinator.com/
    $hn.AllElements | Where {$_.TagName -eq "a" } | Where { $_.Class -eq "StoryLink" } | select "innerHtml"

IWR and ConvertFrom-Json are what got me hooked on powershell. No more learning complex switches for curl or crazy JQ syntax. It's all built in and makes sense.

FWIW, I already have a command line tool that can do that installed in regular Unix: https://github.com/ericchiang/pup The docs even use the same example of scraping HN.

How does Invoke-WebRequest decide if it’s looking at HTML or something else?

Well, you use Invoke-RestMethod for JSON/XML stuff.

Or decide yourself for Invoke-WebRequest to pipe it with whatever the data: ConvertFrom-{JSON,XML,CSV}

With Invoke-WebRequest you get back headers, raw response, etc - and you get to decide whats next. With the RestMethod - just the content as an object.

There is an param to declare response type parsing and if you want to use different parsing. Older versions of powershell use IE and webrequest will randomly barf. It really sucked. You can also use a rest request method that uses json.net to deserialize I believe .

I just attempted to prove you wrong, but it does look like it's fixed.

So is creating secure strings.

Cool!

Creating secure strings isn't exactly fixed; the type exists but they aren't encrypted in memory on Linux because it doesn't have the DPAPI (Data Protection API) from Windows:

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/9199

Same here. I love using pwsh 7 on windows, but on Linux it was a whole different experience. Granted I was trying to use it on an Arch instance, which isn't technically supported, but I couldn't even get PSGet or PsReadLine to work. However, I was pretty great to run the same scripts cross OS with basic commands like Invoke-WebMethod/Invoke-RestMethod

Invoke-WebRequest doesn't even work correctly on windows for a large amount of very vanilla web functionality.

Powershell is a nice idea, but Microsoft is kidding themselves if they think it's even close to the alternatives.

Can you give any example? This hasn't been my experience.