Is Powershell a necessary skill for Windows developers like Bash / Borne for Linux / UNIX developers?

Question

Given that the main shell commands and scripts are necessary for the developer in UNIX-type environments, I'm talking about rounded, small-sized, devops-types - is this Powershell equivalent for Windows?

I have a computer with Windows 7, but I am doing all my development in a UNIX environment, whether on a Mac or Linux computer with VMWare. I am not a system administrator, but I fill up as one here and there. Grep, sed, awk, file structure, network, etc. UNIX is pretty well rooted. I have been using these tools for many years. Even decades.

Recently, I have been cheating on a Windows machine a bit. My habit is to go down to the command line to do something useful, instead of pointing and clicking all the mania, usually associated with using Windows. But with Powershell, I'm completely lost. Nothing makes sense to me.

Is it worth learning? Is that even how Windows people work? Will everything change suddenly? Are there any benefits to becoming a Powershell guru?

Answer 1

I think so. PowerShell is the management interface for Windows Server 2012, and almost all of this has been ported to 2008R2 and Win7 (Windows Management Framework 3.0).

There are many people who resist switching to PowerShell, but MS has decided that this is the way forward. End users will not use it much like on the command line, but developers and administrators absolutely need to understand this.

Benefits of becoming a PowerShell guru? You can automate a lot more Windows, much easier than you can with BAT / CMD scripts or Windows Script Host (VBScript / JScript) scripts. Remote management / access is very simple and designed to allow you to control a large number of machines from one center.

I find that I’m doing a lot of the tasks in PowerShell that I used to go into Visual Studio, because getting started faster allows me to quickly prototype on the command line, and it has many cmdlets built in that do the tasks that I usually had to write a dozen lines FROM#.

Answer 2

I believe that it can be as powerful as Bash, but all command names and syntax are different. Check out this article, it compares some common UNIX commands with powershell equivalents.

http://windows-powershell-scripts.blogspot.com/2009/06/unix-equivalents-in-powershell.html

Since I started using powershell more, I find it is definitely worth exploring.

Answer 3

My 2 cents:

I work as a full-time system administrator, freelance designer and photographer for passion. For my work with the system administrator, I often use powershell. Sometimes a developer is sometimes a photographer (to manage my photos!). In my working environment there are 6 developers (.net) full time, and no one knows powershell (and someone never knows what is). Powershell is really a power shell since bash, with a big difference in that it is based on a .net structure and works with objects, not just chains.

Answer 4

PowerShell cannot compare with Unix console environments, the approach is very different ...

You can win some scripts using your own vbs, but nested tools are very limited, maybe you can use gnuwin32 to try some basic unix tools on env windows ..

In my experience using win7, I can tell you that powershell is only powerful for Windows products, such as sharing, active directory and others, but it’s very frustrating to use it as unix shells, you cannot ... (You cannot change flags in real time from the kernel in windows like linux)

I am now using a simple Windows shell with python to get some high developer features that I missed from Unix systems .... but for now this is not enough.