Agree!

I'll go further. PowerShell covers a lot of the concerns in the OP out of the box. It is extremely well thought out and is one of my favorite cli models to buy into.

Powershell is just plain a great shell. Blows all the *sh variants out of the water. I'd love for it to gain traction in Linux (so that, for example I could use it as my shell on my desktop) but I don't really see that happening.

What are the things that are stopping you?

I use MacOS on my personal machine and Linux for various shellboxes and I switched to Powershell years ago and haven't looked back. Occasionally I invoke bash as a language runtime for checking shell script stuff, the way I would any other language's REPL, but for a shell? Powershell is strictly better.

The one actual problem with Powershell in this area is quoting for external commands. It's solvable in scripts by replacing certain things with double-quoted equivalents but not really interactively, and it is an occasional pain (though I still think it's overall less of a problem than quoting in general in bash and its ilk).

WhatIf in Powershell also remains completely broken; not that it doesn't work, but it is not properly passed down the call stack like it's supposed to from cmdlets or functions written in PowerShell (as opposed to those loaded from .net assemblies).

Where have you seen this? If the function does it properly (SupportsShouldProcess) then it should pass down automatically.

I have seen it, I think it's because it's not easy to see whether the cmdlets or functions your calling support and support it right. It does work, but I have seen it not always work and that results in having to check or test every command. I think the GP is overstating the incovenience, though, and Powershell is still much, much better than any Unix shell in this respect (which simply has no mechanism and no standard way to discover one).

I have written just in the last month cmdlets that have SupportsShouldProcess, and it does not pass on as it should. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn... and https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/pull/221#issuec...

Oh yikes!