> PowerShell is still treated as a second class citizen in the Windows eco-system
This is so completely wrong it's not funny. The majority of Microsoft's server GUIs are now built completely on PowerShell. This includes basic products like IIS, Exchange, etc. Where I work, most consultants who implement or maintain these products have learned PowerShell and use it regularly. Windows Server 2012's default option is "headless" install (Powershell only), and that's been an option since at least Server 08 R2. Powershell is certainly not an afterthought - it is at the core of Microsoft's server administration GUI plans. MS have completely committed to it.
Interesting - babarock is incredibly wrong from the windows perspective, but from the unix perspective entirely correct. (I work in IT and handle things on both sides.)
Comparatively, the recent and steadily increasing reliance on PS is evidence of microsoft's recognition of the utility of a shell for managing their more complex software.
On the other hand, the fact that PS doesn't have it's own readline yet (it's just a wrapper for the cripplingly ancient CMD) and its incredible lack of basic features (just try managing AD users in PowerShell - sure its easy once you've written your own custom script or mapped it to a web interface or something, but there's no built in equivalent for adduser or about a billion other basic UNIX commands).
It all depends on your perspective. I'm glad to see MS moving away from their decade of GUI dependence.
just try managing AD users in PowerShell - sure its easy once you've written your own custom script or mapped it to a web interface or something, but there's no built in equivalent for adduser or about a billion other basic UNIX commands
It's not that bad. Adding a new AD user is a built-in command. From the docs:
Have you used PowerShell ISE 3.0? Its user experience is better than the standard tools on *nix that I've used, and of course much better than the old powershell. You get very good autocompletion (similar to what you get in IDEs like Eclipse or Visual Studio), syntax highlighting, debugger, etc.
As I understand it, a lot of Microsoft's certification training materials and tests are Powershell oriented... instead of clicking around in GUIs they teach you how to make the changes via Powershell commands. (I'm not an MS admin but I've heard this second hand so my apologies if it's not completely accurate)
One big problem with powershell is that it is not installed on all windows machines by default (I think it is only on some server versions). So you can't just whip up a script and have it run on any machine like you can with bash, which is a first class citizen.
Only if baby Jesus is using an open source BSD. Bash is standard on all Linux and OS X installs, and vastly more featureful than the POSIX sh standard. If you're a decent bash hacker and really in a situation where you can't rely on a better scripting runtime to be installed, you'd have to think really hard about whether FreeBSD/OpenBSD is worth the hassle.
Honestly, the BSDs need to get their act together on this and either bash-ify their shells or just use it. Their existing environment is pretty poor.
(I guess an argument could be made that Android is another non-bash environment. But the shell there is so terrible that I literally don't know anyone that's used it for anything in production.)
(Edit: I guess technically I should include Solaris people in the list of bashless victims. But, well, yeah...)
It depends on what you're scripting, some things really are expressed best in the shell.
But tools like perl, python and ruby aren't nearly as universal as you'd like them to be. Obviously if you maintain the box and are deploying an app, they're trivially available. But if you're shipping software to be installed on end user boxes of unknown configuration, they're a dependency that can bite you. That's why things like self-extracting archives and shell-based initscripts persist, even though they look ugly to modern eyes. They do what they need to do very well, and they do it universally.
Depends on your target. Bash is the LSB shell. If your scripts are only targeting Linux, then you should be able to safely assume bash is there. On Linux, by default, there isn't even a real Bourne shell anyway; it's a symlink to bash.
If you're writing cross-platform then yes, sh would be a better target, but a lot of environments are going to be Linux only.
This is so completely wrong it's not funny. The majority of Microsoft's server GUIs are now built completely on PowerShell. This includes basic products like IIS, Exchange, etc. Where I work, most consultants who implement or maintain these products have learned PowerShell and use it regularly. Windows Server 2012's default option is "headless" install (Powershell only), and that's been an option since at least Server 08 R2. Powershell is certainly not an afterthought - it is at the core of Microsoft's server administration GUI plans. MS have completely committed to it.