Inspiration found: Windows PowerShell

I talked last night about getting a bit too used to the whole Windows Vista thing. Well, I went to a talk today about the Windows PowerShell (formerly Monad) and my interest has been re-sparked.

PowerShell has been in the works for a really long time and now that I've actually seen what it's capable of, I'm really really excited.

Now, all command shells do essentially the same thing (launch processes) and most modern command shells let you string together pipelines of commands which pass around text. We've gotten so used to thinking about things like this that most UNIX system programmer types are all text parser experts because they need to use things like awk and sed to chop input up into something usable.

In contrast, PowerShell passes objects through pipelines, not text. Do a "dir," and you get a list of objects that each represent information about a file. Do a "tlist," (UNIX guys should think ps) and you'll get a list of objects which each represent information about a process. The objects are passed around before any of the pretty printing takes place, which means that you can have your functional cake, and each all the pretty formatting you can handle, too.

So what are the other neat-o points?

• Wildcard expansion and tab completion pretty much everywhere (file-system, parameters, methods, etc.)
  
• Nearly all system state mapped to the file system. "cd env:" gets you into the environment variables, where you can do a "dir." "cd hkcu:" gets you into the registry. And so forth.
  
• Full access to the .Net platform inside the shell. Run "[Datetime]::now.AddDays(2)" and you'll get an object for the day after tomorrow.
  
• Loads and loads more.
  

Jeffrey Snover, the PowerShell architect, maintains a blog that's really worth checking out. And he explains this far better than I do, too.