Just to put it out there.
Some history.
BAM!
There was Powershell. At first, I didnt quite understand its potential, and role in the Microsoft product suite. Then came the ‘not-quite-headless’ windows server. (I was like: oooh, It looks like Microsoft is Changing/learning and stripping overhead (read things that can potentially break, need maintenance, costs resources and money). Still I didn’t quite understand the PowerShell potential.
Last month a team member needed to install Oracle Fail Safe on a Microsoft 2012 box. He needed to run a Powershell script to set some things right and that didn’t quite work. Hating the fact not being of any help, I figured, lets spend some time on learning Powershell. Its time I (ex-Windows NT4,2K,2K3 guy) understand this puppy.
Then I came across this site: Microsoft Virtual Academy and followed the course.
Conclusion: Powershell (V3) is way more cool then I anticipated! Why?
At first I thought another Linux shell clone was being created. But don’t let yourself (like I was at first) be fooled by the Linux looking Pipe approach. Its not text being redirected, its objects. For those not understanding objects: Instead of sending the ‘thingy description (text or parameter)’ over the pipe, its sending you the whole thing.
The simplest way to explain this is by example. The following command gets the directory (as an object), pipes the object to the select method, then we select object properties to output and manipulate “@{…}” some output while we are at it. (There are aliases for dir or ls if you prefer that and would have worked instead of get-childitem)
This Object approach makes you wickedly flexible as you can see.
Another cool thing is that you are not bound to the console. You can output to the console, but there are several nice, cool options. For example: output an Get-Help article to a window with the -ShowWindow parameter. Or output the table above to an Gridview.
If this wasnt cool enough yet, there are tons of very cool features that are incorperated. A few of many are: Updateable help-system, Remoting to PSsessions on machines, Remoting using sessions locally, Importing PS management modules from remote machines (so you dont need to install them), An PS webapplication for remote -mobile- management using powershell. Yeah, the list continues.
Microsoft lose the need for the explorer process and you regain my trust ;-)Definitely worth looking into is the free (Yeah ITS FREE) getting started training by Microsoft.
Back to Oracle Enterprise Linux
(Without the cool management interface, but still the OS I prefer in my backend)
Tagged: Cool, Is, Power Shell, Powershell, PS
