Old guy; Windows PowerShell. Worth learning?

[btiffin]

If I'm jones'in for a programming shell, do I stick with and keep cussing at CMD or is it worth learning Power Shell, (starting from a level of not even knowing which one of x86, x86 ISE or whats the what I should be running).

Cheers

[mirhagk]

Powershell is a VERY useful thing to learn. It's essentially a fully fledged programming language targeted towards administration stuff. I've never taken the time to fully learn it because I don't do enough admin like stuff, but if you do do that much stuff then it's worth it.

Just out of curiosity, why are you spending so much time with command prompt? And doesn't cygwin set up a unix-style terminal?

[btiffin]

Yeah, still using the little one's Windows system. Even though I'd like to get some work done, I try and run as Guest on this machine until asked to perform technical support by the owner.

And command lines are where it's at mirhagk, a side-effect of being trained in the 1970's.

I spent a few hours last night with WPS, it's almost not heinous. I will admit (as crusty and stuck in his ways) that I'm curious about it's design philosophy. How did ls become Get-ChildItem, old farts wanna know how deep this design may go. I'm also looking for where the regular expressions might be hiding. At least the creators of WPS were nice enough to add man as an alias for Get-Help.

Cheers

[mirhagk]

Yeah power shell is pretty decent. While the commands take longer to write, the verb-noun combo makes pretty good sense, and makes it easy to learn. Then the aliases make it all really quick to use, if you use a command a lot, just make a shorter alias.

But I'm just wondering what you do in the command line lol. It's one of the biggest reasons why I've never dove into a linux system too much is because I'm either in a text editor or a browser 99% of my time. If I'm in a systems editor (whether GUI or command line) I'm in there to do something quick, in order to get back out and continue programming or something.

[QuantumPhysics]

This is a little off topic but still somewhat along the lines. You should try OllyDebugger. I use it for reverse engineering, not to cause harm, but just for the educational curve! It's loads of fun, focuses around the assembly language. Moving bits here and there. Overall, it's very nice for cracking password-blocked software. Key generating (mostly reverse engineering). Try it out, you won't regret it. They do not update it anymore. Latest release was version 1.1. But it is great and I am pretty sure it is also open source!

[TerranceN]

Like mirhagk mentioned, cygwin is a good alternative. It comes with a windows version of bash and all the common linux commands. Through its package manager you can get some terminal emulators like mintty, rxvt, and even an xserver and xterm. The only bad thing I've noticed so far is that it doesn't play well with REPLs. I had to install the python package in cygwin's package manager, and I had to use readline and rlwrap to get ghci and scala REPLs working.

@mirhagk: What makes the command line powerful is the ability to pipe simple programs together to create more complex programs. Here's an example of what I mean. This becomes REALLY powerful when you add new programs because the number of ways they can be piped together grows exponentially. It's the same reason I like Vim so much.

[mirhagk]

@Terrance I know how powerful it is, I do love the command line for it's power, but it still doesn't give me something that I need to use the command line for lol. Web browsing, programming and playing video games. Sure programs can be compiled through command line, but that's a matter of pressing up and enter a bunch of times, not having to do any real work.

Like I said, if I'm in command line, it's usually for something bad, and I want to get out as soon as possible.


EDIT: I just want to say that this thread has inspired me to replace command prompt with powershell, since worst case scenario it's just powershell.