Why do I use PowerShell?

Well, here’s a little back story…last year I was involved in a Pluralsight Play by Play with Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover for launch of Open PowerShell on Linux and Mac. Before this video, I didn’t take PowerShell seriously. Basically, if I Google’d a problem and found a solution in PowerShell I would grind my teeth and copy and paste the text into the foreign blue console and cross my fingers.

Fast forward a bit to PowerShell Summit this year, Jason and I were slated to do a session together on…PowerShell on Linux. I had to miss the trip to Seattle this year, but during the session Jason told a story a story about me learning PowerShell…check it out here around 28:27. Its pretty funny. 

Pipelines similar but different

If you don’t want to listen to Jason’s story, it goes like this. I needed to learn PowerShell…FAST. I had only a few weeks to build my skills enough so that I could sit at a table with the inventor of PowerShell and an industry recognized expert and have a meaningful conversation and oh yea, record a 5 hour training video. So as Jason says I “did the Don Jones/Jeff Hicks thing” (there’s a newer version available now) .

Well, having a UNIX background I understood the concepts of a pipeline. UNIX processes have had pipelines for a long time. Byte streams can move data from one command to the next allowing you to build more complicated commands. PowerShell can do the same, but it moves objects…rather than text/byte streams. 

Well, while learning PowerShell I built a PowerShell cmdlet pipeline to get the top 10 processes on a system sorted by CPU.

Get-Process | Sort-Object -Descending CPU | Select-Object -First 10 

And to do the same in bash, we need to do something like this…

ps -aux | sort -nrk 3 | head

So, I worked through these examples and I fired up my email client and sent an email to Jason and said hey Jason…here’s two commands that do the same thing. One in PowerShell and one in native bash commands. I asked…hey, which one do you think I like better? 

As we learned in the PowerShell Summit video, he expected me to answer with my crotchety, suspenders wearing UNIX guy answer…well he was in for a surprise. I told him I liked the first one better…the PowerShell version.

Now hear me out, I’ve been using Linux/UNIX since 1997, I manage large internet commerce sites through the holiday season, I’ve done PhD level research on topics like IO, CPU scheduling and memory management…literally my fingers can type the bash commands to get the top 10 processes without even thinking…muscle memory to the max. BUT, the PowerShell version of this literally reads like a sentence. Get-Process, Sort-Object, Select-Object, pretty straight forward stuff here. No surprises. the commands do exactly what they say. This means, I can put stuff like this in a script, and other people can read it without 20 years of experience. 

What’s next?

Well, since the Play By Play, PowerShell isn’t the Google the answer…copy/paste solution anymore for me…I’ve decided to really take this seriously and PowerShell is now a go to tool in my toolbox. I’m not telling you this because I’m a Microsoft MVP, I’m not telling you this because I did a video with THE PowerShell gurus…I’m telling you this because I really use PowerShell now…every day.

This post is the first post in a series I plan on bring to you that will document my discovery process of using PowerShell on Linux. We’ll discuss the techniques and technologies I use to solve some real world problems in a multi-platform world!

Now, there’s two things I really consider special about my first go with PowerShell…asynchronous job posting via Remoting and Desired State Configuration (DSC). We’ll cover these topics in this series. 

The post Why PowerShell? appeared first on Centino Systems Blog.