Frozen (s)hell

PowerShell 6 (alpha)

Yes, this is a Microsoft product. Yes, it's open source (MIT, with the exception of the Windows components on the Windows version). Yes, it uses Mono to some extent. And yes, you may think Microsoft releasing an open source shell that works on Linux is a little like Linux users porting Wine back to Windows. But there are some good reasons for PowerShell and good reasons for using it on Linux. The Linux Voice podcast team were reminded of this recently when we happened to make some throwaway comments about PowerShell, and one of PowerShell's engineers, Jeffrey Snover, was good enough to respond to our nonchalance in the podcast's comments. He pointed out that PowerShell's real benefit for Linux users comes when you're dealing with structured data and APIs, such as JSON and REST, running on different hybrid clouds – especially Microsoft's. PowerShell is designed to handle these transactions natively, in a similar way Bash is designed to handle POSIX natively. After all, this is how Microsoft's Azure is using Linux and is the reason for a lot of its kernel development and other investments. As Snover puts it in the podcast comments, "The goal is to make it simple and easy for customers to consume as much computing as makes sense for their business."

It may seem weird running PowerShell on Linux, but this makes sense because there isn't a shell I know of that's great at dealing with cloud-focused technologies. Instead of local scripting, for example, PowerShell scripts use .NET to pull in all kinds of external APIs, from Exchange and SQL Server to VMware vSphere. While there's no doubt these are Microsoft-centric, many are already industry stalwarts, and having a tool that talks to them natively from Linux is definitely a good thing.

Project Website

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell

Troll your friends by replacing Bash with Microsoft's PowerShell.

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