What’s your favourite to use? Mine is Fish due to its ease of use and user friendly approach.
Bash is the pepperoni of shell tools being reliable in every field no matter what but I’ve moved to Fish as I wanted to try something different.
So what’s your shell of choice?
I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.
TBH, I use Powershell on my Windows install, and they’ve made some good improvements over the years. I forget that it also works on Linux.
Shame v1.0 ships with new installations, and you have to manually go out and install the latest versions to get the benefits. Dunno why MS doesn’t just automatically update it with everything else.
Version 2 came with Windows 7. Version 5 comes with Windows 10 (and I think 11). V7 is the latest but being cross-platform doesn’t come with some of the Windows-specific modules built into v5.
V1 never actually shipped with any version of Windows
Windows 7 shipped with V2, 8 with V3, 8.1 with v4, and 10 with v5 and later 5.1.
5.1 is the latest (and last) version of Windows PowerShell.
All versions after that are just PowerShell (or PowerShell Core for version 6)
Not sure why they don’t bundle it by default, but starting at v7.2 it can be updated by Windows update
I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.
Even on Windows I try to avoid Powershell. I use bash through GitBash there, too. But, I don’t mind using Powershell for work, because some workflows are already implemented in ps1-scripts.