No, cmdlets are hard to develop. You have to follow a hard-to-understand API that doesn't ship with the operating system. With bash it is stdin and stdout... that's all you really need to know to write any shell script. With PowerShell you have to write a very particular type of script that compiles to .NET (and again DOES NOT SHIP WITH THE OS); your language choices are limited to about 3. Interoperability is important to something as fundamental as shell scripting and PowerShell is not interoperable.
I lost you on your "Does not ship with the OS" point. What are you referring to?
PowerShell has shipped with the OS since WS 2008 and Vista. We have ALSO made it available to prior versions of the OSes (e.g. down to XP.
I also missed your point about interoperability of shell scripting and PowerShell.
PowerShell can launch any process, pipe data to it and read/parse the data that it generates.
PowerShell can be launched by any process and read/write text.
So when you say "interoperate" that is what I'm thinking of so I think they interoperate well. Are you referring to something else or are you experiencing a problem?
Thanks!
Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for Windows Server and System Center
> I lost you on your "Does not ship with the OS" point. What are you referring to?
The SDK for developing cmdlets. This would be equivalent if on unix you needed an extra download to write to stdout/stderr.
> So when you say "interoperate" that is what I'm thinking of so I think they interoperate well. Are you referring to something else or are you experiencing a problem?
Cmdlets can only be developed by languages created by Microsoft. You cannot write a cmdlet in Python, Perl, or even C.
