Re: Linux

Patch Tuesday a nightmare?

Only for incompetent sysadmins

Re: Linux

The whole reason for patch Tuesday is to make it more easy to schedule work required in patching, this contrasts with the Linux approach whereby fixes are released as and when they're ready. It's a case of what you want, if you want to be able to schedule your workload, go with monthly releases, if you want to update your systems as soon as realistically possible, go with the released when it's ready method. I would contend that most major corporations have an internal patching cycle, which means that they queue up a series of patches, after they've been tested and release them in a weekly/monthly/quarterly distribution, so it's more likely that the patch Tuesday model suits them, but it's not for all.

If you are going to contend that TCO for Linux is lower than Windows, or vice versa, please cite a reliable non-partisan source, otherwise it's just a pantomime "oh yes it is", "Oh no it isn't" type of argument.

"please cite a reliable non-partisan source"

Oh you would do well to find one of those! I think all of the 'reports' I have seen on TCO have been funded by someone with a vested interest in the outcome.

Re: Linux

@Eadon

Not all distros of Linux are free. Some are, some aren't. However, running them in at enterprise level (about the same kind of level that most of those features become really 'interesting') you're be an unmitigated fool to put a front line service server on anything but one of the distros that comes backed by sound commercial support contracts. That's part of the cost of the Microsoft products; they carry a service warranty with them (to a degree).

TCO is not a flat line across all activities. Linux provides advantages in some places, it loses out in others. That's the nature of heterogenous systems; each has its flaws and weaknesses, use them to your advantage, rather than becoming an advantage (or disadvantage) to just one tool.

Not sure where you get the 'fewer servers to do the same work' idea from. Certainly for some variants of work, that's true. But it's a part of the story. In other workflows, you'd need more Linux boxes (if they could do the particular task).

As to Linux being more secure.. I've had to laugh at many people who've told me that, and I'd had to point out that they'd already been rooted. Security is what resource you put in to it. Linux has some damn fine tools to secure a system at various levels, you just need to have the manpower available to keep up with it. In most places, top management doesn't quite understand how essential it is to have good security, so you don't get resourced for it.. If it's not resourced, it's going to be lacking somewhere, Linux or Windows. The approach is different for the different OSs, and you have to see them differently in the slots they fit into in an enterprise.

Again, patch tuesday isn't so bad if you're resourced for proper maintenance, and have proper rollback plans in place. If you don't, Windows or Linux (or any other OS you care to mention) you're in a whole barge load of trouble..

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this was posted from my Linux laptop, as I've left the Android tablet in the living room. This sits next to my Windows workstation which I use to connect up to work remotely when necessary and it hosts all the tools I need to administer the Windows side of things. I use an iPhone because it does what I need in the way I need it done.. Each piece was chosen specifically to achieve a particular function, and I find I'm more than happy with the diversity.. Far happier than if I'd stuck with one product.. And that's they way I go in work too.. Heterogenous all the way..

Re: Linux

Linx is only a lower TCO for webservers - for everything else - Linux is far more expensive as there are a numebr of studies that demonstrate..

And you couldnt be more wrong about performance. Windows Server 2012 is a long way ahead of Linux in terms of performance - for instance 16Gbps throughput as a fileserver and 1 million IOPS on a single VM - as mentioned above. Linux simply can't match those numbers.

Re: Linux

How is Linux more secure? Enterprise Linux has about 10 times the security vulnerabilities of Windows Server, Linux as a server OS is far more likely to be hacked than a Windows Server, and much of the security design that is integral to Windows are bolt on afterthoughts for Linux (SEL, proper ACLs, etc, etc)

This is why the military use solutions like 'Windows for Warships', and why the US DoD just spent $600 million on Windows 8....

MSFT service sucks donkey balls

"That's part of the cost of the Microsoft products; they carry a service warranty with them (to a degree)."

If you want to talk about excellent support service... that would be erstwhile Sun Microsystems, or some of the remaining commercial UNIX vendors. MS "support" usually consists in a phone call with some Indian dude. Sun used to send someone on-site, on-time, on the spot. I haven't experienced Red Hat support yet, but the difference between UNIXy support levels and MS is dismal.

!@AC security pro

So which vendor recommends running an up-to-date antivirus software 24/7?

Re: Linux

So that post shows he is right? Linux has about 10% worse performance then.

Why you would do it in reality is another question, but at least for now it is clear that Windows Server 2012 scales better on at least 2 key services...

Re: Bah!

@Stevie I use Windows every day. I use Linux every day. I bash (and praise) both as I see fit. I qualify as loud.

Cookie?

Re: Bah!

Yeah, if you'd be busy here and there helping your friends fixing their ubiquitous monopolistic broken, aged, infected Linux boxen using your powerful almighty Windows system.

Re: Bah!

"It would help if the loudest anti-windows ranters would actually admit to the last time they had hands-on (or even eyes-on) experience of Windows [insert marketing tag]."

Last Windows experience: WinXP, WinVista, Win7, Win8.

Last Windows Server experience: Win2003, Win2008, Win2008R2.

With Win8 and now Win2012, it seems MS is going backwards.

Re: Power Shell?

>1. Takes an inordinate amount of time to actually start. 11 Seconds each time on speedy, modern hardware

On my machine it opens *instantly*. Only the first time you open PowerShell after a system reboot does it take a little longer. Maybe you should check to see what's going on the the profile scripts?

>2. Lacks many of the basic features of a unix-like shell

On the contrary, Unix shells lack many, *many* of the features of PowerShell.

>3. Has no concept of handling text in an elegant manner, every thing is an ``object``

Yes it does. Text is just a sequence of string objects. But you will hardly ever use the powerfull string functions of PowerShell, because they simply are not needed when you operate with objects.

>4. It's WAY too wordy for even the simplest tasks

There are short aliases for most common commands, all parameter names can be shortened as long as they are ambigous. Do not be fooled by the fact that it is considered good style to use the long forms when illustrating code. PowerShell can be every bit as terse as bash - sometimes more so.

>5. PATHs are still using the wrong slash

Ignorant. PowerShell has always accepted both the forward slash as well as the backward slash forms.

>6. No persistent command history

Just save it. Or set a function to save it on exit and reload it on initialization. Or better yet: Build a library of actual snippets. Oh, bash doesn't have snippets?

Where is the consistently implemented risk management in *sh shells? In PowerShell you can run any action command with -WhatIf. In that mode no changes will be made to the system. Instead the changes that *would* have been made are reported to the user. It even works with scripts: If you support -whatif as a script parameter it sets global preference to "whatif" and none of the commands of the script will actually execute.

Where is *sh shells integration with transactions? You can use PowerShell to connect to multiple database servers, message queue servers, etc. and perform tasks in a transaction context and ensure transactional consistency.

Where are *sh shells suspendable and resumeable scripts? PowerShell workflows can run scripts across system restarts, suspend a script/job on one machien and resume it on another machine.

How do you create parallel *sh scripts? PowerShell supports parallel execution within a workflow script.

Oh and:

Linux: tail filename.log

PowerShell: gc filename.log -La 10

done.

Re: Power Shell?

Couldn't agree more. Powershell is fantastic, but only if you know how to use it.

Re: Power Shell?

You forgot: Can you cryptographically sign a .sh script? No?

Re: Power Shell?

>1. PS is slow to start up or to do anything. Denying it is just stupid, anyone having used both a linux shell or PS knows it.

PowerShell is based on .NET. The first time you load it after system restart it will JIT the assemblies. After the first time it starts instantly.

>2. What features does a linux shell lack in your opinion? Truly interested in your answer.

Ok:

1) Object oriented pipes so that I don't have to format and reparse and be concerned about language settings. Object oriented pipelines

2) Command metadata. PowerShell commands, functions and even *script files* expose metadata about the names, positions, types and validation rules for parameters, allowing the *shell* to perform type coercion, allowing the *shell* to explain the parameters/syntax, allowing the *shell* to support both tab completion and auto-suggestions with no need for external and cumbersome completion definitions.

3) Robust risk management. Look up common parameters -WhatIf, -Confirm, -Force and consider how they are supported by ambient values in scripts you author yourself.

4) Multiple location types and -providers. Even a SQL Server appears as a navigable file system. Want to work with a certain database? Just switch to the sqlserver: drive and navigate to the server/database and start selecting, creating tables etc.

5) Fan-out remoting. Execute the same script transparently and *robustly* on multiple servers and consolidate the results back on the controlling console. Try icm host1,host2,host3 {ps} and watch how you get consolidated, object-oriented process descriptions from multiple servers.

6) Workflow scripting. PowerShell scripts can (since v3) be defined as workflows which are suspendable, resumable and which can pick up and continue even across system restarts.

7) Parallel scripting. No, not just starting multiple processes, but having the actual *script* branch out and run massively parallel.

8) True remote sessions where you don't step into and out of remote sessions but actually controls any number of remote sessions from the outside.

9) PowerShell web access. You can now set up a IIS with PWA as a gateway. This gives you a firewall-friendly remote command line in any standards compliant browser.

10) Superior security features, e.g. script signing, memory encryption, proper multi-mode credentials allowing script to be agnostic about authentication schemes which may go way beyond stupid username+password and use smart cards, tokens, OTPs etc.

11) Transaction support right in the shell. Script actions can join any resource manager such as SQL server, registry, message queues in a single atomic transaction. Do that in bash?

12) Strongly typed stripting, extensive data types, e.g first class xml support and regex support right in the shell. Optional static/explicit typing. Real lambdas (script blocks) instead of stupidly relying on dangerous and error prone "eval" functions.

13) Real *structured* exception handling as an alternative to outdated traps (which PowerShell also has). try-catch-finally blocks.

14) Instrumentation, extensive tracing, transcript and *source level* debugging of scripts.

15) Consistent naming conventions covering verb-noun command names, common verbs, common parameter names.

>What I still cannot do in powershell is use a MUA like pine or mutt; a browser, irc client, rss feed reader, mp3 player,

PowerShell can start external processes like any other shell. If you have an rss feed reader then just start it. Sheesh!

>3. text processing in PS is ... painful. It is not its strongest point. Try finding matches of a certain string on a 3GB text file (like an iis log file in a busy web server), you will soon grab naar findstr.exe or script something fast in Perl

No, I will just use select-string (alias sls). Just type sls <message> logfile.log -all. It is that simple and super fast.

>Parsing the windows event log on the other hand is very convenient with PS. Slow, but convenient ;-)

Get-EventLog actually *searches* the event logs, as opposed to stupid bash tools which *read* the entire logs and passes them through a filter. Want to guess what is faster?

>4. yes, syntax can be terse. It's a shame that MS just *ignores* the rest of the industry and 40 years of knowledge and experience to invent another wheel instead of just adopting the posix standard every admin they want off Unix already knows. Weird.

posix is a *Unix* standard. And if you believe that command names like ls or awk is the epitome of consistency you are seriously deluded. Why does Unix need multiple commands (ls, find, du) to search the file system when PowerShell needs only one? Because PowerShell combines much better than *sh tools, that's why. Instead of including options and flags to control output format, sorting in every stupid command, PowerShell has a class of commands for that - which works with *every* other command regardless of whether they list file system objects, process information, rss items, certificates, user accounts or organizational units.

>5. You're right on paths, those work fine.

yes.

>6. snippets? O, you mean like 'functions'?

No, I mean *snippets*. Launch PowerShell ISE and hit Ctrl-J. Pick a snippet and *edit* it before issuing it. You can build your own snippet library or download one or simply use the built-in snippets.

>Risk management? Like thinking what you're doing before hitting enter? Or writing scripts properly with proper error handling?

No, risk management like asking a command or a script what it will do *before* actually executing it. It is a built-in feature. PowerShells errorhandling is superior to bash, btw. Like real structured exception handling, or the fact that cmdlets actually use delimited input and any errors reported during operation is uniquely referenced with the items of the input stream that were processed when the error hit. In *sh commands are simply streams and if you want the same level of error reporting you better pray that the author of the command replicates the input on stderr - otherwise you have no idea what part of the input stream wasn't processed.

> Database shells? Never heard of cli tools for databases? Those tools ensure the consistency of the database, so please spare us your bullsh*t ITIL lingo.

Ah, *another* cli? How about dreaming up a CLI which can handle database servers, mail servers, web servers or any other type of server using the very same tools? And how does a cli tool for databases coordinate transactions with the message queue server? Ah - it doesn't because it is a *database* tools.

>And you should just google job control to learn about suspending and starting jobs.

Yeah. You can suspend a *process*. But can the process/job automatically persist it's state so that it can resume from the same state after e.g. a system restart? No - because then the process is terminated all its state is lost. PowerShell does that.

>Oh and:

>Get-Content : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'La'.

>At line:1 char:19

>How hard can it be?

yeah - try PowerShell 3 - which this article was about. Then return. Ignoramus.

Re: Power Shell?

Hardly.

Power Shell is a power, not shell

A shell is a an interface that glues programs together. What it does is providing both user and programs to interact with one another in a convenient, simple, seamless fashion.

Sure bash can do many things by itself without utils, its gonna be slower and several magnitudes weaker (perl 5 can do hundreds times more and faster what bash does). Instead, you primarily use bash to talk to those many little almost perfect utils.

Why does Unix need multiple commands (ls, find, du) to search the file system when PowerShell needs only one?

Okay,

ls - lists files in various, permissions formats

du - prints disk usage, and so on in various formats

find - is an extremely power and flexible utility, I'd be very surprised, PS can do as much as 10% as find does and be as efficient.

Moreover, find in combination with xargs, (e)(f)grep, wc, sed, awk and other utils can do virtually anything, thanks to bash/zsh/ksh or whatever shell you prefer.

Can you beat the interactive pager less?

Get-EventLog actually *searches* the event logs, as opposed to stupid bash tools which *read* the entire logs and passes them through a filter. Want to guess what is faster?

Do you know how (z)grep operates? It's actually extremely fast and efficient and doubt that PS can beat it. awk/sed are very fast as well, so with awk or sed you do

(g)awk '/eventLogRegexp/{do a lot stuff}'

sed '/eventLogRegexp/{do stuff}' # use options -r for extended regex and/or --posix for the posix regexp

So you don't read anything missing that regexp

Try icm host1,host2,host3 {ps} and watch how you get consolidated, object-oriented process descriptions from multiple servers.

No bash alone won't do it, you can perform a similar task through ssh and public keys shared by servers, something like:

for host in host1 host2 host3

do

echo " Host name :$host"

ssh $host top -b -n1 | head -15 # or use almighty ps

done

That will give you a consolidated report about the top processes per host

The power of a posix shell and posix utils is that it is an environment of independent, simple, very efficient utils and apps yet capable to talk to each other and shell very well, thus adhering to the KISS principle. The atoms of this ensemble tend to be small and simple. Similarly, emacs is a collection of independent bits incorporating shells and utils plus it's own power. That is why it is awesome in dired, grep, tramp, calc modes multiplied by the shell commands on a region...

While PS seems to have larger add-on chunks that is not easy to divide. Creating a complex cumbersome monster in my mind is not creating a shell.

Re: Power Shell is a power, not shell

> ls - lists files in various, permissions formats

> du - prints disk usage, and so on in various formats

> find - is an extremely power and flexible utility, I'd be very surprised, PS can do as much as 10% as find does and be as efficient.

ls finds files/dirs. And then it also has many(!) options for controlling output formatting. And it has options for controlling sorting. So ls doesn't do "one thing" - it does multiple things which other commands also do. Not very "unixy".

find also finds files/dirs. And then it has many(!) options for controlling output formatting as well. And then it has options to *execute other processes*. wtf? Why would a find utility execute other processes? That's not very "unixy" as in "do one thing and do it well".

ps finds processes. It has many, many options for controlling filtering, output formatting (again!) and sorting (again!). Why do multiple utilities include options for controlling output formatting and sorting beyond what their task is? That's not very "unixy", is it?

Enter PowerShell. ls is an alias for Get-ChildItem - which does one thing: It finds files/dirs. It has very few options compared to the *nix counterpart - simply because it doesn't do output formatting or sorting. It also doesn't need an enormous amount of filtering options because the objects it produces include all of the properties that you could possibly want to filter on.

PowerShell ps is an alias for Get-Process. It also doesn't have output formatting or sorting options. It also doesn't have a vast array of filtering options.

PowerShell ft is an alias for Format-Table. fl is an alias for Format-List. These commands do output formatting. Output from ls and from ps can be piped to the Format-* commands.

PowerShell ? command (an alias for Select-Object) does filtering. No need for ls or ps to do filtering when you can just pipe the objects through this command. No need to control output formatting and ensure that last access time is formatted in a certain way that you know you can reparse in the next command without loss of precision or being skewed by language settings.

PowerShell sort command (alias for Sort-Object) does all of the sorting for ls, for ps or for any other command. Other commands don't have options for controlling sorting, because unlike *nix shells, that's not *needed*

So which shell has a design which allows tools to do one thing and do it well? Look at the commands. PowerShell commands do one thing and not the kitchen sink like *nix commands. And yet you can combine PowerShell commands in straightforward ways to achieve functionality not even possible in *nix shells.

the powershell unixness

Interesting, that you forget that powershell with all of its commands is one thing, while find/grep/ls/awk/sed etc are independent utils.

find has quite a few different options, I'd agree, but it still does one thing, it "searches for files in a directory hierarchy".

You can't really remove options, like -name (-iname, -regex) or -atime and similar. Any respectable utility would be addressing very same features. Yes, -printf is just a formatting option and a classic C function. -exec is not recommended. Besides that, I am not aware of any bugs it ever had. Note, that find cannot be used as serial editor like sed or awk, all these work quite happily together in bash/ksh or zsh though.

If PowerShell has limited number of options/features, it's weak, if it has all the options of a *nix shell and many utilities, it is a One Monstrous Shell of All Trades notwithstanding your claims. And it could be both as well.

And yet you can combine PowerShell commands in straightforward ways to achieve functionality not even possible in *nix shells.

Would you mind providing an an example, please?

It's hard for me to say what PS cannot accomplish, you can't play with it without a Windows system (while you can with bash using CYGWIN on Windows). I heard that MS haven't devised a descent terminal or console similar to what we have with *nix systems.

Re: the powershell unixness

> Interesting, that you forget that powershell with all of its commands is one thing, while find/grep/ls/awk/sed etc are independent utils.

PowerShell also uses utils. It is just that PowerShell has defined utils as cmdlets. Cmdlets pipes objects instead of text/bytestreams. Get-ChildItem is a util (with an alias ls). It finds child items of a location and sends filesystem objects through the pipeline. Because filesystem object are rich objects with property getters for a large number of properties (last access time, last write time, security information, reparse points, attributes, state, name, location/parent, version info ...) a *generic* filtering cmdlet can filter on all of this information and a *generic* sorting cmdlet can sort on any combination of these properties.

That is why PowerShell doesn't need find. It already does all of what find does by simply combining Get-ChildItem with Where-Object (which have aliases "ls" and "?", respectively). So to find all files which are larger than 1GB you'd write

ls . -r|? length -gt 1GB

Find in unix has it's own expression language which is not the same language used to filter processes or records from a csv file. PowerShell has ls and a filtering cmdlet. One does the finding, one does the filtering.

Want to limit the list to just the 10 last accessed files and format it in a table with the name, last write and length columns? Use the sort utility to sort, use the select utility to limit the list to 10 and use the format-table command to format as a table:

ls . -r | ? length -gt 1GB | sort -des lastaccesstime | select -first 10 | ft name,lastaccesstime,length

One utility to find file system objects, and just that. One utility to filter objects using a common expression syntax and just that. One utility to take a subset and just that. One utility to format in a table. I could write

ps | ? ws -gt 100mb | sort -des starttime | select -first 10 | ft starttime,name,id,cpu

And I would get a table of the last 10 processes started which consumes more than 100mb of memory. Notice the similarity? Notice how it doesnt format and reparse?

> find has quite a few different options, I'd agree, but it still does one thing, it "searches for files in a directory hierarchy".

No, it also executes processes, duplicating functionality from the shell. And it also implements a (non-standard) expression language, duplicating functionality from the shell itself and from other utilities.

> You can't really remove options, like -name (-iname, -regex) or -atime and similar.

Yes I can. Just make it return objects and ensure that name, time etc are properties.

> Yes, -printf is just a formatting option and a classic C function. -exec is not recommended. Besides that, I am not aware of any bugs it ever had.

It has serious security problems, so now -execdir is recommended. Still stupid. And -print0 illustrates the problem with text formatting+reparsing: the simple options handles uncommon file names *really* badly. None of that is a problem with object pipelines.

> If PowerShell has limited number of options/features, it's weak, if it has all the options of a *nix shell and many utilities, it is a One Monstrous Shell of All Trades notwithstanding your claims. And it could be both as well.

PowerShell utilities don't need as many options on the utilities to achieve more functionality than *sh shells, simply because they combine better. One utility to format in tables, regardless of object types.

> I heard that MS haven't devised a descent terminal or console similar to what we have with *nix systems.

PowerShell ISE blows any *nix console out of the water: Syntax highlighting, much better completion, auto suggestions (intellisense), context sensitive help, source level debugger and much more.

Re: the powershell unixness

PowerShell ISE blows any *nix console out of the water . Syntax highlighting, much better completion, auto suggestions (intellisense), context sensitive help, source level debugger and much more..

Please be easy on thee claims. "Much better completion"?

"ISE provides and up to 8 PowerShell Unicode-enabled consoles (Runspaces) in a tabbed UI, as well as the ability to run only the selected parts in a script."

It looks more like an IDE, not a pure console to me, in this case, it won't blow GNU Emacs, or vi out of the water that's for sure.

Say, does it have something similar to a grep-mode, where you run a grep command to look for a keyword match and a buffer is created with highlighted hyperlinked matches?

Console runs interactive shell and can be used to launch scripts/apps. You can also use to compose simple scripts, usually oneliners.

# to find all files which are larger than 1GB... ls . -r|? length -gt 1GB. Find where?

find . -size +1G

looks more elegant to me.

#Want to limit the list to just the 10 last accessed files and format it in a table with the name, last write and length columns? Use the sort utility to sort, use the select utility to limit the list to 10 and use the format-table command to format as a table:

ls . -r | ? length -gt 1GB | sort -des lastaccesstime | select -first 10 | ft name,lastaccesstime,length

find . -size +1G -printf "%a\t%f\t%k\n" | sort| head

would do a similar thing.

PowerShell utilities don't need as many options on the utilities to achieve more functionality than *sh shells, simply because they combine better. One utility to format in tables, regardless of object types.

That's really cool (however, the syntax is not as appealing).

If everything must be an object to be able to talk to PS, than its capabilities are limited, unless you rewrite all utilities to talk objects. Say, bash doesn't really care what it glues together. Any app that either accepts text or outputs text can be used. Quite a few objects out there are plain text, despite MS efforts. Think html, xml, logs etc

Consider an an example: you got a text each line of which has fixed number of fields, say 4, separated by some weird char, e.g., ";;;" . You need to print all lines starting with the regex [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}, apply a certain formula to the 3 fields,say,f2*f3-f4^2 , print a result on each line and add all results together printing it out at the end. With awk you could try this

awk --posix -F";;;" '/^[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{3}/{

s=$2*$3-$4^2;sum+=s;print $0,s}

END{print "Here is your total -->",sum}

'

Re: the powershell unixness

> Please be easy on thee claims. "Much better completion"?

Oh yes. PowerShell *automatically* completes command names, parameter names *and* parameter values. It doesn't need external completion definitions bolted on like bash. PowerShell has completion for *all* cmdlets, *all* functions, *all* aliases and *all* script files.

Yes, even your own scripts declare parameters in such a way that PowerShell can suggest completions for parameter names and parameter values. If you declare a parameter as an enumeration or with a validation set, PowerShell will both validate the parameters *and* use the information in completions.

The Get-Process cmdlet for instance support completion for process names. If you request completion for the -Name parameter, it will look up current process names and suggest completions from that list.

PowerShell has wildcard completions for all values. If you use * or ? wildcard characters it will suggest only the matching names/values.

In ISE it even supports intellisense (auto suggestions). As soon as you type certain characters like "-" or "." it will open a suggestion list in a popup window *without* interrupting your typing. The list is adjusted as you type.

So yes, PowerShell completion blows bash out of the water. Bash needs external definitions, doesn't cover all commands, doesn't automatically cover aliases, doesn't cover functions and certainly doesn't cover your own script files. Bash completion doesn't have dynamic completion and doesn't have auto suggestions.

"ISE provides and up to 8 PowerShell Unicode-enabled consoles (Runspaces) in a tabbed UI, as well as the ability to run only the selected parts in a script."

> It looks more like an IDE, not a pure console to me, in this case, it won't blow GNU Emacs, or vi out of the water that's for sure.

It is an Integrated *Scripting* Environment, and it is where most administrators live today. The main pane is the command console which is a normal console, only with syntax highlighting (as you type) and auto suggestions (as you type). There is *nothing* similar for bash. An no, emacs doesn't cut it. Laughable, really.

> Consider an an example: you got a text each line of which has fixed number of fields, say 4, separated by some weird char, e.g., ";;;" . You need to print all lines starting with the regex [0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}, apply a certain formula to the 3 fields,say,f2*f3-f4^2 , print a result on each line and add all results together printing it out at the end. With awk you could try this

You totally miss the point. awk is not a feature of bash. awk is awk and can awk can be used from PowerShell as well. You come up with a deliberately convoluted format specifically tailored for awk and present it as a feature of *bash*? I could come up with a (less convoluted) XML or json format which would be almost totally impossible to process with bash and awk, but which you could probably find some external tool that could help you. To powershell traditional tools like awk are just commands which consume and produce sequences of strings (lines). Strings are just objects

The *shell* has to be measured on how well it allows the tools to be integrated, not on the set of tools available on the system. In that sense PowerShell trounces bash. How would you for instance read a rss feed and insert the records into a database?

Re: the powershell unixness

You totally miss the point. awk is not a feature of bash. awk is awk and can awk can be used from PowerShell as well.

No, it seems that you are missing the point. bash is not omnipotent, it's pretty simple. It's best for gluing things together. Make it more complex, it won't be as attractive (like cmd.exe or PS). Powershell as you have demonstrated is a thing by itself. So it has to be super universal, and in noway it will be. It will not satisfy all possible needs, say it most probably has no curl,mail, imagemagick, video/audio decoders or player...

I gave an awk example. And text is indeed an important entity, despite MS views. awk works very well with bash, will PS do, since it needs objects? Will an average Win admin get it right after getting used to "PS manners"? (First teach them to not be afraid of *any shell*)

And we didn't even compare performances of these. I have strong doubts that cmdlets can outperform grep/find/wc/awk/curl etc

Interestingly, one of the most used command

(e)grep 'regex' file

PS analog looks weird (if it's right):

select-string f.txt -pattern xyz -CaseSensitive

only with syntax highlighting (as you type) and auto suggestions (as you type). There is *nothing* similar for bash. An no, emacs doesn't cut it. Laughable, really.

You don't need syntax highlighting for interactive stuff in a console input, it is pretty useful for the output though and it is always there. Auto-suggesting without not very useful when you're not asking for it, it would be a nuisance for me. I am more than happy with the tab key and bash autocompletion including options, aliases (and btw that's default config of my distros).

As far as laughs at Emacs are concerned, spare those for the ISE and Visual Studio that are both useless pieces of software before GNU Emacs.

Or maybe you can find just very few things present in emacs, just say:

* grep-mode

*interactive (regex) search

* run-shell command on region with optional outputs on it or into a special buffer

* tramp-mode to handle ssh/sudo/su or whatever windows has

* reverse polish calculator calc with many math, calendar functions etc many CAS mode (maxima,pari-gp, matlab etc)

* dired mode

*tons of other modes

.....

Re: the powershell unixness

>>You totally miss the point. awk is not a feature of bash. awk is awk and can awk can be used from PowerShell as well.

>No, it seems that you are missing the point

I'm not missing anything. Here is how I'd do it in PowerShell:

gawk -F";;;" '/^[0-9]/{s=$2*$3-$4^2;sum+=s;print $0,s}END{print \"Here is your total -->\",sum}' weird.txt

Notice the difference? What? there is no difference?

Old-style utilities like (g)awk that produces text can be used as easy in PowerShell as in bash. No difference. It is only that PowerShell offers much more. Text is just one type of object, powershell can work with all kinds of objects. Bash can only work with text, so *everything* has to be text, which precludes a lot of data, like e.g. trees.

Now, get the weather forecast for Los Angeles and format it in a table:

([xml](iwr http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=2442047).content).rss.channel.item.forecast | ft

The table will have columns automatically derived from the forecast item, with the item names as table headers. Try to do that in bash.

Re: the powershell unixness

> Interestingly, one of the most used command

> (e)grep 'regex' file

>PS analog looks weird (if it's right):

>select-string f.txt -pattern xyz -CaseSensitive

The sort form in PS is:

sls regex file

So it is even 1 character shorter than grep.

Don't be fooled by the fact that it is considered good style to use the long form in scripts and when explaining commands in articles. PowerShell has a consistent shortcut system where

* aliases can be used

* parameter names can be abbreviated as long as the abbreviated form is unambigous

* parameter names can be omitted for parameters which also has positions.

Unlike in bash, in PowerShell it is the *shell* that does the parameter binding. The shell looks at the command definition and figures out whar arguments to bind to which parameters and with which coercion, e.g. parsing text as date or number if the parameter expects date or integer. The canonical form of the above is:

Select-String -Pattern <regex> -Path <path>

But because Pattern is the first parameter and Path is the second parameter, the names can be omitted.

Simple and consistent.

Indeed, if you ask the shell to explain the syntax ("help sls") this is one of the forms it responds with:

Select-String [-Pattern] <String[]> [-Path] <String[]> [-AllMatches <SwitchParameter>] [-CaseSensitive <SwitchParameter>] [-Context <Int32[]>] [-Encoding <String>] [-Exclude <String[]>] [-Include <String[]>] [-List <SwitchParameter>] [-NotMatch <SwitchParameter>] [-Quiet <SwitchParameter>] [-SimpleMatch <SwitchParameter>] [<CommonParameters>]

Re: And we wonder why techies get no respect

Yeah, but the Windows only and Linux only people have been making these arguments for about fifteen years, rather than bother to learn the system that they don't know. Why would they learn something new, when they can loudly slag off the other system.

There is the matter of bettering yourself by learning new things, but that's difficult, loud slagging off is easy.

Extreme Negativity

There also has been a major surge in drive-by down-voting, I would prefer to know why I should blow something out my ass.

I blame society.

Re: MS vs Linux

To correct myself - linux does have a licence of course - GPL2, but the advantage stands, you can't be sued for using Linux with that. It has stood up in court.

Re: MS vs Linux

@Eadon - Please give it up, it's very tiresome and I don't know if you think you're convincing anyone that you're right or if you're just trolling. What it would be saying to me if I were an dedicated MS user who didn't design heterogeneous environments is that Linux users don't understand how things work in the real world and will confidently assert things that they believe as facts, regardless of any truth involved.

Re: MS vs Linux

Here you go - fixed it for you:

Microsoft - moderate vendor licence and support costs - Linux significantly higher licensed vendor support costs.

Microsoft - license and support evaluation tools provided - Linux no licence / support management tools provided.

Microsoft high TCO for webserver, lower TCO for almost everthing else - Linux - vica versa.

Microsoft - rare reboots - Linux rare reboots

Microsoft - integrated security, low vulnerability counts, faster average fix times on predictable release schedule - Linux - key security features are bolt on extras (SEL, NFS 4.1) or not even available (for instance expression based ACLs) - higher vulnerability counts, longer fix times, no regular patching release schedule, more likely to be hacked as a server OS.

Microsoft - closed source - hard to find vulnerabilities - Linux - open source, back doors will be spotted and exploited.

Microsoft outperforms Linux as file server, database server and VM hypervisor - Linux best as?

Microsoft - Server 2012 scales to 640 processor in a single server - linux kernel 3 scales to 512 processors in a single server

Microsoft - more powerful object orientated shell - Linux - legacy shell, not as powerful or flexible

Microsoft - licensing clear and safe - Linux - no licensing for included patented technology. Risk of being sued.

Microsoft - more powerful management tools and lower resourcing and TCO requirements - Linux tools complex and resource intensive to manage

Microsoft - fast and powerful database based registry - Linux - no registry, legacy text files that require parsing

Microsoft - massive suite of commercial applications with full integration. Linux - lack of integrated end user experience across disparate applications.

Windows - used in super computers - Linux - used in more super computers.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/111808-windows-hpc-supercomputer.html?hpg1=bn

Re: MS vs Linux

@AC 13:33

Still punting the unpuntable eh RICHTO ?

Re: MS vs Linux

"Microsoft - Server 2012 scales to 640 processor in a single server - linux kernel 3 scales to 512 processors in a single server"

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 Kernel (3.0.10) Limits

max. # logical CPUs 4096 (x86_64)

OracleLinux 5/6

Max Number of CPUs/Cores Unlimited

Re: MS vs Linux

"SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 Kernel (3.0.10) Limits

max. # logical CPUs 4096 (x86_64)

OracleLinux 5/6

Max Number of CPUs/Cores Unlimited"

The above are quoted from the SUSE & Oracle websites.

https://www.suse.com/products/server/technical-information/#Kernel

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/025994.htm

The SUSE limit may be logical cpus but Windows Server 2012 is limited to 64 physical cpus