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Comment by jclay | Hacker News Reader

After moving back to working on a Windows machine the last several years and being “forced” into using PowerShell, I now find myself using it for these sorts of tasks on Linux.

I now use PowerShell for any tasks of equal or greater complexity than the article. It’s such a massive upgrade over struggling to recall the peculiar bash syntax every time and the benefits of piping typed objects around are vast.

As a nice bonus, all of my PowerShell scripts run cross-platform without issue.

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I've dabbled in PowerShell before, but I've always found the objects you get from cmdlets to be so much more opaque than the plain text you get from Unix output, which makes it harder to use the iterative approach to development the article and other commenters describe. Do you have any tips for poking around in PowerShell objects / a workflow that works for you?

I’ve tried to love it while using it as an interactive shell, but it’s hard for me to lose the Unix muscle memory and remember their verbose commands.

For anything more than a single pipe, or anything that requires loops or control flow, I switch to Powershell in Visual Studio Code with the PowerShell extension which has intellisense and helps to poke around the methods on each object. From there you can select subsets of your script and run with F8 which helps me prototype with quick feedback.

Use `gm` (alias for Get-Member)

e.g like

    ps | gm

Will tell you exactly the different object types and member methods and properties are returned from `ps`.

    ls | gm

Will tell you that ls returns two different object types (directories and files).

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