It's a way of using Windows that is very tolerable to POSIX commandline diehards. The similarities are numerous and include enhanced scriptability and even small details like up-arrow command history. You could get all of that with Cygwin, but Powershell adds tight OS integration, access to COM objects (or whatever we're calling them this year) as well as the remoting of objects. It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.
Kon-Peki|1 year ago
I remember watching a video on one of the various Microsoft learning sites in which Snover and another guy were interviewed about the creation of PowerShell. One of the two guys said that after they realized that UNIX-style wasn’t going to work they turned to VMS and drew a lot of inspiration from it.
jojobas|1 year ago
Even Tab-path completion had to be done in an incompatible way.