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What are you talking about? Cygwin provides packages for bash, dash, fish, tcsh, zsh, and others. It's not a crutch, these are the exact same shells you run on Unix(-like) systems. The source is the same, albeit with some Cygwin specific patches, but that's no different than any other Unix-like distribution that applies patches to upstream packages (e.g. Debian, FreeBSD, Gentoo, etc...). Your NiH assertion doesn't even remotely make sense. PowerShell is fundamentally different from traditional Unix shells and has many interesting, unique & innovative features. Not liking them or agreeing with the philosophy is entirely valid, but suggesting they've just refused to use an existing shell because of NiH isn't born out by the facts. Honestly, I'd suggest trying to adapt an existing Unix style shell to Windows as the "official" shell would be an inherently bad idea at worst and extremely difficult at best. Apart from the numerous issues that traditional shells have which PowerShell seeks to address (reliance on string parsing, lack of consistency in commands/parameterss, etc...), traditional Unix shells are very much built around a Unix operating system philosophy, especially wrt. exposing operating system internals, devices, etc... via the file system. That's a great thing, but it's not so much applicable to Windows. You'd either need to radically re-design large chunks of the system to conform to the Unix philosophy of exposing much of the system via the file system, which let's face it, is unlikely to happen, much less any time soon, or augment the shell with a lot of extra support for Windows specific functionality (e.g. the Registry, WMI, etc...). Things as simple as ACLs on Unix won't even map nicely. Better to have a shell that works well for Windows and fits its administrative model than trying to shoe-horn in a shell designed with a completely different administrative philosophy in mind. You mention OS X, and yes, they did get it to work. As other commenters have mentioned though, OS X is UNIX. As in, UNIX(R). The userland API exposed by the kernel is based off BSD, as are large chunks of the operating system (although, Apple seems to be replacing them one by one). It's pretty easy to use a nix shell when your operating system is largely based on Unix (at least, from the perspective of userland applications). |