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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

    catch 
    {
        Write-Error $_
    }

Powershell is fairly new... I'm surprised Microsoft is using `$_` instead of the common (in UNIX) `$?` to represent the current value in the pipe. It's almost like they go out of their way to not conform to anything other OS' have already done.

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Conforms to Perl as "default argument".

Hmm, I didn't realize that (not a Perl guy obviously). Even so, Perl isn't a shell, it's a runtime/language. Whereas powershell is, a shell. I would have expected it to be more UNIX-like in that regard.

Powershell is a shell and a fully-fledged language. In that way it is considerably more advanced than bash/sh/csh/ksh/etc.

Are you saying that /bin/sh isn't turing complete?

Not at all. What I'm saying is that /bin/sh has idiosyncratic, incomplete language syntax and semantics (mostly for historical reasons). For example, variable comparison is not built in but rather is dependent upon the external [ (or test). It would be hard to call a language 'complete' when it doesn't even support variable equality testing.

Whatever you think of Windows/MS/etc, Powershell is a decently-well-designed, complete language with a number of useful, convenient constructs. For example, here is a native Powershell hashmap (that can be looped over, etc.):

  $states = @{"Washington" = "Olympia"; "Oregon" = "Salem"; California = "Sacramento"}

Nice, no?

Powershell has lots of cool features, startup-time not being one of it. It's very important for some of these scripts to start in a matter of milliseconds.

Powershell starts pretty immediately for me. Older versions chugged, but testing on my desktop and laptop opened pretty much instantaneously.

Then I need to try it out again. After months of working only with Linux, OSX - I miss a bit the good ole NT :) - Far Manager, System Internal tools, WinDBG, etc.

> Whereas powershell is, a shell. I would have expected it to be more UNIX-like in that regard.

Well they don't adhere to Unix because they're trying to be better.

Pipes pass _objects_ around in Powershell, and the entirety of .NET libraries is available for use in Powershell... including plugins and everything.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/powershell-piping-filterin...

New Microsoft features are available too, like V-Server integration, Package Management through Chocolatey and so forth.

I am not exactly a Powershell guru, but its definitely evolving in a way superior to BASH scripting. I mean seriously, BASH is so backwards that I can't imagine why ANYONE would seriously recommend taking cues from it.

http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_07_01.htm...

Bash isn't the end-all of Unix shells.

No, but it seems people nowadays (young users that equate GNU/Linux == UNIX) only know bash.

I have played with ksh and others.

But when it comes down to writing something that others use, you can almost always rely on BASH being installed on their machine.

The other shells... not so much. I hear zsh is pretty good though.

I was more referring to the likes of es, rc and Inferno sh. The rest are all just variants of Bourne or C shell in some way, and even then Bourne and C don't have much in the way of compelling differences.

Again, it's not an exit code or return value, it's an _argument_ to the catch block.

>Whereas powershell is, a shell

Hmmm.....I think PowerShell blurs the line between shell and full blown programming environment (as in I can build complete WinForms apps in PowerShell).

Which UNIX-like?

sh, bash, zsh, korn shell,....

I understand what you're referring to about Powershell ($_ being the current value in the pipe), but what are you referring to by:

> instead of the common (in UNIX) `$?` to represent the current value in the pipe.

Is that common in UNIX? Can you give an example?

PS has $? (it's a boolean though) but I don't follow your comment. $? in Bash isn't comparable to $_ in PS at all, is it?

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