Unix is not an acceptable Unix

Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by ekidd on Sunday June 07, 2015 @07:45AM (#9674244)

I recently discovered that I can do this on Linux, too!

After over two decades of using Unix and Linux, I ran into jq, a tool for querying and transforming structured JSON pipelines: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/

This can be used to do many of things you demonstrate with PowerShell. Here's an example from the docs:

    curl 'https://api.github.com/repos/stedolan/jq/commits?per_page=5' | \
      jq '.[] | {message: .commit.message, name: .commit.committer.name}'

This outputs:

    {
      "name": "Nicolas Williams",
      "message": "Add --tab and -indent n options"
    }
    ... more JSON blobs...

You can output a series of individual JSON documents, or convert the output to a regular JSON array. You can also output raw lines of text to interoperate with existing tools. And this works especially well with commands like 'docker inspect' that produce JSON output.

I think that PowerShell and jq get this right: More command-line tools should produce explicitly-structured output, and we should have powerful query and transformation tools for working with that output. For day-to-day use, I do prefer jq's use of JSON over a binary format.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by rane on Monday June 08, 2015 @06:07AM (#9678102)

I've written a tool inspired by jq that builds on top of ramda and LiveScript. The motivation behind it was to be able to write pipelines with tools that already exist, instead of having to learn new syntax that can't be used outside that domain.

https://github.com/raine/ramda-cli

The example from before would look like this:

    curl https://api.github.com/repos/stedolan/jq/commits\?per_page\=5 |\
      R 'map -> message: it.commit.message, name: it.commit.committer.name'

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by Canada on Sunday June 07, 2015 @02:26PM (#9675784)

That's cool, though powershell deals in actual objects which are more powerful than better structured input and output. For example, the objects returned by ps have methods for interacting with them.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by myhnaccount108 on Sunday June 07, 2015 @03:22PM (#9676008)

I would argue the object approach limits the universality of the PowerShell way as a general purpose computer interface because it binds it to the necessity of a particular flavor of object system (e.g. .Net) and mutable data which is venom to general purpose pipe and filter systems.

jq looks very interesting though note that it builds upon an underlying notion of text to serialize JSON.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by Canada on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @03:24AM (#9684466)

You can parse streams of text in PS too, so it's not like cmdlets are making the pipeline any less powerful.

As for binding to .NET, I don't think that's very limiting. A surprising amount of stuff is already easily hosted in .NET.

I would argue that all PS needs to be more competitive is: Ports to Linux/*BSD/OSX and a terminal implementation for Windows that doesn't suck.

Cmd.exe is a piece of shit that needs to die:

- Command editing. Is support for at least ^A, ^E, ^W, and friends too much to ask?

- Completion. Who wants to cycle through 4253 possibilities one at a time?

- Copy/paste. Programs actually STOP executing when you select text, like as if you ^Z in Unix. Even with quick edit enabled so you don't have to ALT-SPACE-E-ENTER<select stuff>ENTER, the fastest way to paste is 4 keys: ALT-SPACE-E-P.

- No SSH. Microsoft is addressing this. It's borderline criminal that Windows doesn't just ship with OpenSSH server already.

- No screen/tmux. I can't even talk about how it deals with resizing without using a lot of profanity.

- Lack of echo by default is seriously annoying.

In short, make the terminal feel like Putty and the editing/completion features feel like bash and I think PS could give all existing shells a run for their money.

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