2016-04-09 at 3:36 AM UTC
protip: install cygwin and don't waste your time.
Windows people will tell you about the technical advantages of powershell, and in a lot of cases they'll be right. I don't think there's anyone who won't admit the POSIX standard IO model is a little clunky, everyone's wanted a little more expressivity and a little less awk/sed/cut glue/magic here and there but POSIX (unix specifically, but I'd argue it applies to POSIX itself) really embodies and highlights the strengths of the worse is better philosophy. Sure things like string escaping and delineation are a pain in the when ass all you have is 1 or 2 bytestreams but it performs in the standard cases really well and it's so simple you can't help but love the "elegance".
2016-04-11 at 1:57 AM UTC
aldra
JIDF Controlled Opposition
I don't think it's worth 'learning' powershell per se; like lanny said it's pretty convoluted and for standard automation, you're generally better off just using general batch script, or if you have the functionality, bash/zsh/whatever.
unfortunately there are some things you may need powershell for; with a lot of MS products there's no easy way to hook into them without using either powershell or a .net API - something I've had to do recently was write a powershell script to dump subscription information out of Office365 because there was no other way without writing a proper application to do it. previously I've also had to use it for the WMI functions to dump installed applications and configuration in a tabular format so we could look for softwarez patterns in a bunch of systems that had connectivity/application problems, but if at all possible I'll avoid it like the plague.
