Same here. I keep hearing that Powershell is so good, but I have to look up every little thing. It’s all too specific and you can’t remember it all.

If I recall the Verb-Noun idea is supposed to make it clear what is happening, take a look through stuff like the approved verbs for defining cmdlets. There’s aliases and stuff for sure for example I think ls is an aliases for Get-ChildItem in PowerShell.

It’s supposed to make it so you don’t necessarily need to look things up, need to do something to an item? Well you can Copy, Remove, Rename, Move etc, and while yeah that’s a super basic example that you know the equivalent linux commands for, the concept is supposed to apply everywhere. Now, whether or not people follow the guidelines is probably another story.

I don’t really hate shell scripting, feel like they all have their place, complex stuff though is nicer in straight PowerShell than bash IMO, but I’m fine using either.

the fact that every small thing is its own cmdlet is super annoying. I can do everything in Linux if I know 10 commands

That sounds more like a clash of cultures than a real problem. In Linux you need to know 10 options and possibly subcommands for each command. Naturally the same concept has different flags, and the same flag has different meanings in different commands. Is that really better?

As much as I hate windows powershell is actually decent.

The blue powershell window is for me, but running powershell.exe in conhost, or windows terminal is fast enough.

TIL. Looks like I will be installing Nushell. This is neat. Especially how everything returns the final value.

Select-String

It’s really useful too. You can either pipe in text or for example Get-ChildItem a directory of files and it will parse them all. As usual it returns a helpful object with properties like line number.

The idea with powershell isn’t to be a text parser - so grep doesn’t really work. When you pass things through pipes, it’s a full object with multiple properties, and those you can filter with either simple expressions like select-object [-property] or with more complex expressions: https://4sysops.com/archives/add-a-calculated-property-with-select-object-in-powershell/

I can maybe chime in since I’ve used both. Basic operations like if statements, arithmetic and loops are a lot closer to what you’d expect on PS. The barrier to programming in bash vs PS is IMO a bit higher because bash heavily uses symbols for everything. This does make PS way more verbose but more easy to wrap your head around it when unfamiliar with the syntax.

I prefer bash but for anything bigger than 5 lines I prefer proper scripting language like python or js and making an alias for “node path/to/js/script.js” and using execSync(“program param1 param2”) to run shell commands.

Long story short, I prefer bash because it’s built in and I know it better than PS, I expect PS guys to feel the same way.

Its a completely different shell, not just another terminal emulator.

Its more readable, and its syntax is less arcane than bash.

For example, a script to get the first line of a file and its lenght in bash is:

#!/bin/bash


if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 filename"
    exit 1
fi

filename="$1"


if [ ! -r "$filename" ]; then
    echo "File '$filename' does not exist or is not readable."
    exit 1
fi


read -r first_line < "$filename"


echo "First line: $first_line"


length=${#first_line}

echo "Length of first line: $length"

There is so much I hate about this, like using a semicolon after the if condition, and ending it in fi.

Versus the powershell version:

param (
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
    [string]$FilePath
)


if (-not (Test-Path -Path $FilePath)) {
    Write-Error "File '$FilePath' does not exist."
    exit 1
}

try {
    
    $firstLine = Get-Content -Path $FilePath -TotalCount 1
}
catch {
    Write-Error "Could not read from file '$FilePath'."
    exit 1
}


Write-Output "First line: $firstLine"


$lineLength = $firstLine.Length
Write-Output "Length of first line: $lineLength"

It feels more modern.