[andy81]

It feels solved in raw Powershell functions, but running external CLI tools inevitably returns text and ruins the workflow.

"Crescendo" has been marketed as a solution and looks cool, but it means relearning the tool or documentation being less useful. The sheer amount of existing time people spent learning arcane git syntax means they're not going to switch to a hypothetical "New-GitCommit" function, even if it accepts arrays or PSCustomObject as input.

[an1sotropy]

Is this the Crescendo you meant https://github.com/PowerShell/Crescendo ? From your comment I initially thought Crescendo was some separate commercial software.

[andy81]

That's the one.

It's for wrappers around existing CLI tools.

Still feels experimental, but it's a nice idea to get objects from e.g. robocopy without dropping into regex and parsing it yourself.

[an1sotropy]

Cool, thanks for the info. It is very intriguing, and I admit that until this HN thread I didn't know about powershell, or appreciate this totally different model for how to connect programs together.

This is probably way off-topic now, and my question surely shows my ignorance, but do you know if there precedent for a program, once packaged to work within powershell (or maybe nushell), to use the associated input and output specification as the starting point for making a web interface to the same code (as bridged by a webserver)? Or have I just described .net ?

[andy81]

I'm no expert on web dev, mostly working in BI/DBA.

Running commands over WinRM or SSH can return objects of any type from remote machines. In the background I believe it's converting them to serialized CLIXML over the wire.

e.g. $RemotePSVersion = Invoke-Command -ComputerName 'SomeOtherComputer' -ScriptBlock {$PSVersionTable}

Rather than the variable $RemotePSVersion being a string it's an object with the type "System.Management.Automation.PSVersionHashTable", just like if you ran $PSVersionTable locally.

For anything that returns text (e.g. external tools like curl/robocopy) you'll usually convert to an object in your script before further processing. That way it can be passed into whatever next steps in a generic way.

e.g. curl https://catfact.ninja/fact | ConvertFrom-Json | Export-Csv '.\HighlyImportantInfo.csv'

curl https://catfact.ninja/fact | ConvertFrom-Json | Out-Gridview

That's less important when working interactively, but one major difference between Powershell/Bash is the relative focus on scripting vs interactive terminal use.