PowerShell 7.1 Release Candidate is lurking around the corner, but first there's Preview 6 to poke and prod Microsoft has emitted an update to the preview of its cross-platform scripting language, PowerShell 7.1. Preview 6 brings the open-source framework a step closer to Release Candidate status, expected to arrive in September. There will be production support from then on, but in the meantime the preview moniker is firmly …
I had no idea that it became cross-platform/open-source. Here's the totality of my knowledge on powershell:
- It exists.
- A bit more unix-y and less pitiful than standard "cmd" on Windows, but if you know bash and aren't stuck on Windows, why??
- Unlike bash, it features object-oriented programming, but if you are looking for something "powerful", uh there are so many other far more compelling tools out there...
- There seems to be a command history feature, but you got to figure it out and configure it prior to using it, so that thing is junk for my purpose.
Long time (25 years, bloody hell where did the time go) Unix guy here, and I only really became acquainted with PS last year. TBH (and I can't believe I'm defending anything Microsofty, but I use VSCode so I guess I jumped that shark a while ago) it's actually pretty impressive, especially when considering it ships as standard with all Windows servers.
The syntax certainly isn't succinct (although they've gone to lengths to add TLA aliases to a lot of common commands), but the some of the stuff you get out of the box is quite neat - autocomplete of any parameter to any command along the lines of oh-my-zsh without the need to install shit, decent documentation on par with man pages and good community repos.
I wouldn't call it my favourite scripting tool yet, but when you're stuck on an enterprise client's server with no internet access and need to run some ETL tasks it's pretty handy. The cross-platform part is a bonus for me as it means I can dev and my scripts locally and test them in iTerm on Mac without having to stare at Windows all day, then zip them up and ship them across as needed.
"...- There seems to be a command history feature, but you got to figure it out and configure it prior to using it, so that thing is junk for my purpose...
That surprises me - it's built into the Windows version (up/down arrow keys) and even remembers commands run in the non-preview version and carries them over.
I'm surprised they've made that a faff. Seems somewhat self-defeating.
To what extent is this cross-platform stuff actually useful?
For example, one of the tasks I use scripts for is to automate the renewal of LetsEncrypt certificates. I do this in FreeBSD, Linux and Windows.
To port from Linux to FreeBSD, you generally just need to put /usr/local/ in front of most of the file locations, and if you need to restart or reload a service, that is slightly different as there's no SystemD.
Whereas on Windows, instead of saving a file to the appropriate location you add a certificate object to the certificate store. So even if I wrote the script in the same language, the things I would ask the computer to do in that language would be completely different.
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