When someone talks about “shell” in the software world, almost every one was certain that the context is *nix. But not in recent past. Microsoft has developed its own task automation and configuration management tool called PowerShell, which it made open-source fairly recently. There are some similarities between *nix shell and PowerShell, but not many.
What is PowerShell?
It is a task automation and configuration management framework developed by Microsoft. It consists of command line interface and has a scripting languageĀ associated with it. When this framework was made open-source, it was also made cross-platform and now can be used on MacOS, CentOS, and Ubuntu apart from Windows.
PowerShell is built using .NET framework. It consists of .NET classes called cmdlet (pronounced as command-let) which execute the given task. A set of cmdlet forms a script. Each cmdlet can access underlying systems such as File System or Registry.
So isn’t this same as *nix shell?
Not really. There’s an important difference. On *nix systems, all shell commands have text output and can be chained together using a pipe (‘|’). However, in PowerShell, the output of every cmdlet is an object and hence subsequent cmdlets need to understand the object when cmdlets are chained.
What all can I do using PowerShell?
- Scheduled jobs
- Sessions
- Desired State Configuration
- Where and ForEach constructs
- and many more.
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