[shatteredspace]

I would disagree and say that while PowerShell is well...powerful, it's not as pluggable as the Unix shell. Purely due to objects vs plaintext. PowerShell works off of .NET objects thus if I want to take output from one command and send it to another I have to verify that the receiving command can in fact receive the object type I'm sending. This is where the Unix shell to me is more 'pluggable' but it makes it more muddy as well. I can pipe plain-text information to any utility but to ensure that it will do what I want and not error out I may have to slice and dice my initial output a bit.

Maybe to you pluggable means an output object from a utility being the same input object as another utility? In this case, Unix isn't pluggable at all.

[pjmlp]

Powershell is much more than that, you are only seeing the basic stuff.

It is the only shell that ships by default on modern OSes that builds up on Xerox PARC ideas.

It is not only .NET, rather anything on the OS.

It also handles COM, DLLs, OLE Automation, WMI, pluggable filesystems.

With Powershell you can easily automate something like use the currently selected cell on an Excel document, and use it as input for something else, including another active application.

Something like that would be possible on UNIX shells with DBus like protocols, and ability to load shared objects into the shell, but on typical UNIX fashion everyone does their own thing and thus the whole experience remains fossilized.

[emodendroket]

You can always transform the output by selecting particular properties, so the commands don’t have to expect exactly the shape of your first command’s output. This is similar to what you’d do in Unix to massage text output anyway.