I have just been trying out the CTP of PowerShell 2.0 to see whats new, and there are good signs of how it really is maturing into a super admin environment. Interestingly, as someone who still see’s the roots of CMD.EXE in its first ancestor, CP/M’s Command Console Processor (remember the back to front logic copying files with PIP?), I still have an issue weaning myself off it and permamently onto PwoerShell. I think that perhaps because of the DCL like structure of the commands it seems more effort to perform a task than in CMD, no matter how much more powerful it is. But with V2 I’m going to make it my default console becuause its so seductive to just be able to CD ENV: into environment variables or CD HKLM: into the registry and then just do a DIR! Try this:
cd HKCU:\software\microsoft\windows\CurrentVersion\run
Get-Acl
… and you will see the permissions for this key! How useful is that, wish this existed back in ‘96.
I love the fact that I can just create a registry key and add values, or grab BIOS data info into a variable with $x = Get-WmiObject Win32_BIOS and then $x.manufacturer contains the BIOS manufacturer name like “American Megatrends Inc.”. Ten years ago we were writing Win32 apps to call from scripts to get this sort of info, all credit to Jeffrey Snover for pulling it all together and making a shell that is flecible enough to leverage and be leveraged.
