Wow, then I've done a lot of apparently-useless PowerShell work.
I beg to differ, by the way. Different is not the same as »not useful«. It's not a traditional Unix shell and doesn't pretend or want to be. That doesn't make it useless, just different.
It's not a traditional Unix shell and doesn't pretend or want to be.
Except in the sense that it provides aliases for most popular Unix shell commands. They even made their aliases incompatible with other Unices, like every other traditional Unix shell.
I agree that powershell is far from useless, but it does feel like there are a lot of cmdlets missing out of the box. It's real easy to end up in Get-WmiObject land for everyday admin tasks.
But WMI is really, really huge. I can understand that there is a bit resistance to providing cmdlet wrappers around every single WMI class, although I think on Windows Server there are a lot more things exposed by default (and I think even more in modules that are not loaded by default).
Also, since PowerShell can work with WMI objects natively it's already close to what a cmdlet can provide.
I beg to differ, by the way. Different is not the same as »not useful«. It's not a traditional Unix shell and doesn't pretend or want to be. That doesn't make it useless, just different.