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by tatterdemalion
3948 days ago
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I have never used PowerShell, so I don't know a lot about the details. But PowerShell pipes .NET objects from one command to the next, which are not just bytestreams but are objects, with methods and such. It's fundamentally different. In UNIX, you have bytes, and the underlying system doesn't know what they represent. Most tools assume they're ASCII or UTF-8 (or whatever) encoded text, but that's all they agree on. In practice, you're working almost always working with structured data - tables or lists or mappings - but you have to remember that for the output of this program, you want to cut on '=' and take -f4, and first you need to pipe it through head and tail to clean up some junk output[1], and this other thing for that program, and whatever. [1] This is a way to get the `time` field from the output of `ping`. |
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That's because the object pipeline is functionally analogous to function chaining within a single runtime like in Python or Ruby, not streaming data between arbitrary executables like in Unix pipelines.
This would be a lot clearer if PowerShell advocates compared it to things that it's actually functionally analogous to, but they are trying to position it as a Unix shell competitor.