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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

Two words: Power Shell. Well, one word.

PS is a "decent command line" for Windows, that can handle most of the things you discuss pretty well.

Why should I learn a new toolchain when I already have one that's just as good but has been around for 30+ years? It's fun to reinvent the wheel, but as a user, sometimes enough is enough. Just give me bash and the coreutils, kthx.

You're completely killing innovation this way. Your bash and coreutils work on Windows, they're just not as useful in that environment. Would you also expect to have bash and coreutils on Lisp Machine?

Also if you don't know this anything about new toolchain, how can you say that your old one is "just as good"?

Caveat: I have been heavy Linux user for past 7 years, but I'm not so quick to dismiss alien technology, especially when it addresses obvious flaws in Unix -- e.g. piping plain text with parsing and printing it again on all stages seems so ancient, I would much rather like to be able to use structured data instead. Also, you could remove the overhead of process initialization if your command line tools are just functions, and not executables. Just sayin'.

PS is just a piece of the puzzle. In fact, if I were to automate things on Windows, I would pick perl/python/ruby(on linux, I use shell scripts only for jobs which are less than 50 lines).

The major question is does the objects which are to be automated lend themselves to automation?

Here is one of the results I found while looking for 'sql server automate'

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187061.aspx

If I were talking about MySQL/PostgreSQL, they lend themselves very well to automating. The shell script just calls the relevant programs.

Likewise, if I am automating nginx, shell is just the glue. nginx provides the nut and bolts, and scripting is the wrench.

Unless IIS, SQl server et al. provide similar facilities, powershell isn't going to help.

I haven't used SQL server in a long, long time. My doubts were from some articles I have read:

http://hal2020.com/2011/07/27/porting-microsoft-sql-server-t...

nix DBA’s used shell scripts as their primary management tool, but the SQL Server of that day was not scriptable. Would those DBA’s accept the use of GUI tools?

So it looks like it used to be the case that it wasn't scriptable, but it is now.

You can script and automate IIS and MSSQL using powershell. I'm willing to bet dollars against pesos that if MS hasn't made everything in Windows scriptable via Powershell, they are currently working towards it.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh245198(v=SQL.110)....

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