Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rohan32 3596 days ago
To help bridge the gap for UNIX users who are switching over - but that being said, it's dumb since I think having the same commands that don't function the same way as the UNIX tools would confuse me more than not having them at all and having to learn a new web request command.
3 comments

It's great to make things better for your users. But that doesn't make it ok to use other's IP to do so. For decades MS has used IP to crush it's competition, so there is absolutely every reason to treat this type of behavior from them as hostile. Is MS gonna give back all the $ Google paid it for Android lawsuits? No? Then it's still just business.
They could have just bundled cURL with PowerShell/Windows like macOS does. But NIH, I guess?
Powershell is an object world, cURL is a string utility. You wouldn't want to bundle it, you want people to use Invoke-WebRequest (current cURL alias).

The alis just needs to be removed. They should replace it with a manpage that suggests cmdlets for popular UNIX commands if those commands aren't found (e.g. if curl returns "not found" it tacks on, "You could try XYZ cmdlet instead").

Powershell is an object world, cURL is a string utility. You wouldn't want to bundle it, you want people to use Invoke-WebRequest (current cURL alias).

Specifically, for non PS users reading, Invoke-WebRequest returns n object with the page content parsed and a live DOM to work with, as well as the request headers and the raw data. It's very convenient.

Including curl.exe would not do that.

If they really wanted to help users switching from Linux/Unix etc. then invoking commands like 'ls' would display a help page informing users how to get the functionality from native tools.