Windows 7: Linux Has Something To Worry About (David's Blog)

Windows/DOS has had a *bad* command shell for a long time…but that is about to change with the October 22nd release of Windows 7.

Windows 7 ships with PowerShell 2.0…and it is *really* good.

PowerShell 2.0 features:

Unlimited output buffer (command prompt had 300 lines by default, and a max of 9999)
Easy text selection (command prompt could only do “screen space” selection, which made selecting multi-line text virtually impossible…no more!)
Aliases for standard Unix shell commands (pwd, cp, man, rm, rmdir, mv, ls, cat, grep, ps, kill, tee, clear)
Aliases for standard cmd.exe commands (cd, cls, copy, help, del, rmdir, rename, dir, type, find, findstr, tlist)
Support for paths with either forward or backward slashes
Support for network resources *without* mapping a drive (i.e. can do this: cd \\share\mypics)
All commands follow a consistent verb-noun naming convention (get-childitem, write-output, etc.) which makes the commands self descriptive and easy to learn
Can use standard file system commands (cd, dir, rm, cp, etc.) on…

Command and parameter tab completion
Really good documentation, with examples via get-help (or help/man)
Script debugger with support for breakpoints, stepping, call stack, and hover over variables to see values
Commands are chained together via *objects* instead of text. Nice example of this powerful feature here.
Can output your results in rich text format to out-gridview. I *love* this feature. Read about it here.
Supported on Linux/Mac via Pash

Here is a nice table that compares all the different shells and their features. PowerShell comes out as the most advanced shell.

Windows 7 marks the first time Windows has had a better default shell than Linux or Mac.

Other Linux advantages that are no more with Windows 7:

Posted on October 11, 2009 11:58 PM | Permalink

David's Blog