If you're working on several Windows systems, Bash is of little use you'll need PowerShell to write scripts. Similarly, XML processing in PowerShell is also straightforward. PowerShell makes it easy to access the Windows registry, even allowing you to navigate the registry in the same way that you would navigate a file system. By using Bash as a developer tool on Windows, however, users can code and build functions or services while working on the same files from both the Linux and Windows CLI. The Bash shell and command language doesn't offer these capabilities in Windows. PowerShell enables admins to edit the registry, manage Microsoft Azure or Microsoft 365 cloud environments, and conduct Windows Management Instrumentation. Output from dir in PowerShell.Ĭapabilities. The output is in the form of file objects with properties, such as date created and size, listed beside the files. Figure 1 shows the output of PowerShell dir commands and how a directory list displays in PowerShell. The commands ls -la in Bash and dir in PowerShell are two separate CLI concepts, but the output isn't wildly different. Although PowerShell is a command-line environment, you can build a GUI interface for a PowerShell script by making calls to. This means PowerShell scripts aren't limited by the native PowerShell cmdlets. In addition, PowerShell is able to use external components such as the Windows Management Instrumentation ( WMI) and the. PowerShell invokes lightweight commands called cmdlets at runtime. PowerShell isn't just a shell it's a complete scripting environment. Picture Linux-first tools - Python, Ruby, Git - that are common in DevOps shops running directly on Windows. With the addition of Bash to Windows, code that developers or infrastructure engineers write for Linux works on their Windows systems too. It was introduced to complement and strengthen CLI-based interaction. PowerShell is most often used to manage Windows environments at scale, particularly in virtualized deployments.īash, on the other hand, is more traditionally suited for development environments. PowerShell is typically thought of as a configuration management tool that brings the capabilities of Linux CLI control into the historically point-and-click Windows environment, although PowerShell can also be used for complex scripting tasks. This means you can use the Bash shell to interact with Linux in the same way that you would on a native Linux machine without having to install Cygwin Bash. Thanks to WSL, however, it's possible to run a true Linux shell on top of Windows. In the past, admins could install Cygwin Bash to use the shell within Windows, but that didn't offer a native Bash experience or proper integration with Windows. It's even possible to launch a Linux shell from File Explorer. WSL makes it possible to install multiple Linux distributions on Windows machines. Much of this can be attributed to the Windows Subsystem for Linux ( WSL). In recent years, however, Bash has rapidly gained traction in Windows environments. Bash has many similarities to PowerShell and, like PowerShell, can be used as a management tool or a scripting language.īash was originally designed for use in Linux environments. Like PowerShell, Bash is a command-line environment through which you can interact with an OS. There are also cross-platform versions of PowerShell that can be used with Linux and macOS. Like the Windows command prompt, PowerShell is a command-line environment that is integrated into the Windows environment. This is where PowerShell comes into play. As such, the Windows command prompt environment is quite limited in its capabilities. Subsequent Microsoft OSes, including Windows 10 and 11, don't require DOS, but emulate DOS through the Windows command prompt.Īlthough Microsoft has made various updates to the Windows command prompt over the years, it's still essentially just a modern representation of a command-line environment that is more than 40 years old. Early Windows builds were little more than graphical platforms that ran on top of DOS. This OS, which was known as Disk Operating System (DOS), never completely went away. Prior to the creation of Windows in the 1980s, Microsoft's PC OS was entirely command-line based. PowerShell might best be described as Microsoft's next-generation command-line environment.
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