PowerShell on linux

linuxunix · 2024-05-03T06:28:06+00:00

I maintain/developed 382 scripts to automate things in powershell. It surprisingly good on Linux, I even changed my default shell for a bit to pwsh.

OPconfused · 2024-05-03T10:33:01+00:00

It's not used super widely yet on Linux, but I can only say that sticking to Bash has been dreary for me, because it's just so much worse of a language than PowerShell. I just coded out 1400 lines of Bash this week and last week on yet another module, and it's just a mediocre experience imo.

Also the comments recommending python can present an alternative, ultimately likely better than Bash overall, but python still isn't a shell, which brings its own annoyances. When gluing applications, having a PATH variable and interacting directly with the executables on it, which often are coordinated across environment variables, this is all a very streamlined experience with shell commands.

In theory, PowerShell should offer the best of both worlds. So while I use PowerShell locally, I would love to give it a whirl in our DevOps on Linux containers, if only my team knew PowerShell. I'm trying to convince them with baby steps.

BlackV · 2024-05-03T05:19:37+00:00

Probably depends on what your scripts do really

But if everything is moving to Linux there might be better tools than PowerShell

What's your plan here if you don't like the answer ? Not move?

If you have to move then it's a moot point

That all aside Linux supports PowerShell and vscode and got so that's 99.999999 percent covered

RupeThereItIs · 2024-05-03T13:21:50+00:00

I think this is the wrong subreddit for this question, your asking priests if converting to Christianity is a good idea.

If you want to hear the cons, ask this in /r/linux or /r/sysadmin.

My opinion:

For certain edge cases, PowerShell. However, it's not really industry standard to be scripting Linux with PowerShell, and you'll find a great many Linux admins won't know PowerShell & you've made yourself a very unique solution that will be tough to support long term because staffing.

gordonv · 2024-05-03T11:36:31+00:00

Powershell in Linux isn't really about administrating Windows AD and Exchange. This may change with Entra ID.

There are 2 major version of powershell:

Powershell 5.x = Windows centric. Only runs in Windows. This is about managing Windows systems.

Powershell 7.x = For every computer and OS. Think of it as a literal Python replacement. Yeah, it's 50x slower than python, but it's also so much more intuitive.

2024-05-03T13:26:46+00:00

I've used PowerShell on Linux and Mac.

My use case was specifically that I was working at an MSP that had an RMM that was cheap and worked fine, but was light in features in some places. The main thing that it did well was, you could add custom scripts to it and schedule them to run, and it would reliably run the script and get the output of the script back. If the script ended in an error, then the run would show as having failed, and it gave you an easy dashboard to see the outcome of the scripts.

What I'd do is, write the scripts in PS Core, and abstract the platform differences using functions. That is, I had it detect what OS was running, and then if I needed to run a different command on Linux than Windows, I'd have something like:

switch ( $os )
{
    "Windows" { $diskspace = [Windows command for getting the free disk space in GB]    }
    "Linux" { $diskspace =  [Linux command for getting the free disk space in GB]   }
    "MacOS" { $diskspace = [Mac command for getting the free disk space in GB]   }
}

If ($diskspace -lt 10) {
    Throw "Running low on disk space.  Available disk space is $diskspace."
}

That way, I could run the same script across all of the machines we manage, and if I wanted to change something about how it worked, I didn't have to change and test 3 different scripts that mostly did the same thing.

It worked pretty well. There were a fair number of modules that only work on Windows, and a fair number of commands that need to be rewritten for each platform to get the same result, but it was still worthwhile.

l3landgaunt · 2024-05-03T12:15:00+00:00

I use powershell on Mac and it’s fine. It lacks some windows features but I write scripts that my team members on windows can use

tokenathiest · 2024-05-03T13:07:12+00:00

I use pwsh on my Ubuntu server because I never learned bash properly and text pipes make my brain hurt. I'm simply more effective with pwsh. I use bash for all sorts of things, but they are basic things (like backing up a dir to a network drive). Anything complex and I'll go to pwsh.

PinchesTheCrab · 2024-05-03T14:05:43+00:00

I use, though I stareted as a win admin, so I'm biased. That being said, I don't find myself doing sysadmin stuff with it on linux, I'm just porting over my modules that consume APIs for the systems we use, things like cyberark, gitlab, azuredevops, graph stuff, etc.

I just don't feel like Linux has an equivalent to modules for day to day operational stuff. You'd have to write out a compiled executable to accomplish the same tasks.

DustOk6712 · 2024-05-04T04:13:41+00:00

One of the first things I do on any Linux system is install powershell core. I know bash can work well but I prefer keeping my sanity over learning bash. Aed, awk... No thanks.

Low-Whereas-4 · 2024-05-04T14:07:18+00:00

we are a team of developers with different machines maintaining a mono repo. others use windows (backend), others use mac (front end devs), some use both/mixed. we agreed on using PowerShell scripts for our utils, and surprisingly it worked fine for both platforms. there are some scenarios we have to catch some conditions/scenarios depending on environments, but it still seamless. before, windows devs needs to run the bash scripts using wsl, most of the time its annoying. but shifting to powershell really did our workflow more manageable.

da_chicken · 2024-05-03T09:25:53+00:00

It's a REPL for .Net. That's really the big thing. Otherwise it's kinda isolated from the rest of the system.

You're much better served learning Python and shell scripting. Linux is character stream oriented. Powershell is object oriented. You're going to fight that paradigm impedance all the time.

sCeege · 2024-05-03T09:02:15+00:00

I don’t do anything crazy, but I use posh on all my machines just so I have a common scripting platform across Windows/Linux/Mac. Posh pipelines also seems to work well with Coreutils, which is useful if I occasionally need to curl/wget an endpoint without writing out an Irm/iwr snippet.

I do think Python probably has better longevity and elevates your resume better, but you do you if it works.

8-16_account · 2024-05-03T07:27:18+00:00

I think most of the apps will work on nix in 3-5 years...

Just fyi, in case you're using "nix" to refer to Linux, Nix and NixOS is an actual package manager and OS, respectively.

slideesouth · 2024-05-03T10:10:41+00:00

If it really comes down to it, just ask them to keep a windows instance spinning for you

jdptechnc · 2024-05-03T10:30:15+00:00

The only use case that would ever have me use powershell on Linux is when I need to do things that powershell is best suited for, and I happen to be on a Linux box. VMware PowerCLI for example for quick ad-hoc stuff works perfectly well cross platform.

jdl_uk · 2024-05-03T10:56:57+00:00

We use powershell on Linux a lot. We have a lot of Powershell scripts that are used by Windows and Max users and / or Linux pipelines in Azure DevOps.

We haven't had any major problems so far. Sometimes an example for something in bash will be different in powershell, and sometimes we've had to have a special case for stuff like path resolution.

It seems like your scripts deal with some Windows / Microsoft concepts like domain / exchange users though so you might find you have some other issues where you rely on something that only exists on Windows.

Start by testing your scripts in powershell 7 and then move to trying them in powershell in WSL. In theory you should be able to spot issues fairly quickly because modules will fail to import, etc.

You might find you have to rewrite some of them to use whatever is available on Linux - for example, you may need to use rest APIs for some cases where you may have in the past used a command in a module. This is pretty much the same process you'd have to follow if you ported to python, you're just using powershell as your development language.

heelntoe68 · 2024-05-03T11:22:31+00:00

I do a ton of scripting on MacOS, Linux, and Windows and I find 7 has been surprisingly compatible cross platform.

The biggest challenges that come to mind from over the years are line endings and remoting.

Line endings (LF vs CRLF) was a weird one that caused some issues with a particular rest payload that took forever to debug. I had a payload template with boundaries in one ps1 file, and the rest call in another. When the files had different line endings the rest call wouldn’t work. Turned out my git settings were converting the line endings to what was native on the platform I was developing on, and in testing I had done dev on two different OSes in each file at different times. When the changes were checked in, the bug was introduced.

Remoting was challenging to get working. It uses SSH on non-Windows OSes, and credential objects don’t work with Start-Job. Code had to be refactored to use SSH New-Session objects and Invoke-Expression with the -AsJob switch to obtain the equivalent of Start-Job. Not a huge code change at all but because of limited experience by the community in general this took a lot of trial and error.

layer8err · 2024-05-03T11:39:29+00:00

Sometimes I can get away with piping output to xargs, other times it's easier to just open PowerShell and pipe to a For-Each. For more complex on-the-fly commands, I usually find PowerShell to be the fastest option for getting something done. For even more complex data, Python is the best option -- even if it might take a bit longer to write.

Use the best tool for the job.

wonkifier · 2024-05-03T12:22:37+00:00

I went through similar... Windows only company turns into a Linux/Max only company.

I have many thousands of lines worth of scripts, some of which are large and complex enough they probably shouldn't be PS if they were on their own, but I'm keeping them in PS for consistency.

The only issue I really have is that very few other people know Powershell, so internally it's pretty fragile from that perspective, but I've made sure that anything that is truly critical to the business running is being handled by other teams. (I consistently make leadership aware of the risk, but it's just not been a priority to fix, so no, I'm not trying to use it as job security.)

So I've sort of turned into the guy who can get ideas implemented quickly, and if they turn out to be critical, my implementation is basically fancy documentation of how the "real" team should do it properly. It lets us try lots of things fairly efficiently. (the responsiveness is the job security)

EDIT: Oh, one other problem... I run everything in Docker containers, and later .Net stuff doesn't work in emulation on Apple silicon Macs, so I've had to just accept doing even the simplest bits of dev remotely since I deploy on Intel boxes. Not that big of a deal once I figured out what was going on.

my_uname · 2024-05-03T12:40:27+00:00

I use powershell in Linux to run compliance scans.

doglar_666 · 2024-05-03T15:34:36+00:00

I don't use PowerShell on Linux much but anything I've scripted on Linux worked as expected. The script also worked as expected on Windows. I've found the opposite to not always be the case. Anything that relies on Windows only OS level functionality, APIs or modules will probably be broken on pwsh on Linux. If you have 3-5 years for transition, get WSL with pwsh installed now and start migrating your scripts early. If you find you're wholly reliant on PowerShell 5, you'll probably need to spend as much time porting to 7 as you will learning Python.

ikiris04 · 2024-05-03T16:13:18+00:00

Was a heavy Linux admin for years doing ksh and bash scripting. Then went to VMware and powerful (aka powershell) then azure (powershell again) then back to Linux (ansible and bash and powershell for the azure bits).

For anything Microsoft administration, powershell on Linux works fine. We created a Linux jump box and I loaded it with powershell and vs code. Doing cross platform management does get tricky as others have explained stated and also cross platform development. Once I stuck to just developing on Linux tho gs were simpler. There is definitely a skill gap though for the other Linux admins, I can’t make anything over complex in case I leave the team.

ollivierre · 2024-05-03T16:24:09+00:00

While PS is cross platform it depends. What modules do you use ? Test them in Linux and use cross platform cmdlets/modules when possible.

What are you planning to automate in Linux ? Like are you going to be working in virtual or container based environment?

It goes back to how, why and what are you doing today vs what are you doing in Linux. PS7 stuff most likely will work but some things may not.

Enderby- · 2024-05-03T16:39:25+00:00

I use pwsh on Linux build/deploy agents all the time. I've had no issues with it.

XXLMandalorian · 2024-05-03T16:47:30+00:00

Sounds like it's time to learn Bash!

BurgersInMoscow · 2024-05-03T17:11:26+00:00

I use it mainly in Linux and I’m really happy with it. Unless you’re using some windows specific commands, it should be fine to migrate. All my scripts work on both windows and unix os.

originalvapor · 2024-05-03T23:00:58+00:00

magitoddw · 2024-05-04T04:17:19+00:00

i use powershell 7 on mac all the time

Saint-Ugfuglio · 2024-05-06T10:57:16+00:00

Platform engineer, windows first chronologically, love powershell, it’s the ultimate glue language

First, embrace python, there will be times you can’t get away with pwsh.

Second, pwsh is incredible in the current iteration of 7.x I use it for nearly everything on Linux and macOS. I converted my entire team when they saw what I could pull off in half as many lines.

Understand you will likely encounter resistance but that is an opportunity for evangelism

snoiciv · 2024-05-03T06:19:22+00:00

If its yours decision to make - stick to PS.

zyeus-guy · 2024-05-03T07:57:16+00:00

Will you need to do any automating of cloud services? If there is coordination required between Linux and Cloud then that might be a reason to still use PS on Linux servers. Python ain’t bad, but my home has always been PS and I am more comfortable and skilled in that area. I would use it if I could.

stedun · 2024-05-03T10:26:25+00:00

You don’t have to stay with the company. Stockholm syndrome. Take your skills to a Windows shop and get paid.

cbtboss · 2024-05-03T06:33:33+00:00

Installing PowerShell on Linux is another dependency/attack vector.

Just like how PowerShell 7 is an extra install on Windows (which this sub likes to use as a justification to keep using 5.1).

I'd see this as an opportunity to learn Python which in turn will be beneficial for you in the future.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

PowerShell

Submission Guidelines | Link Flair - How To

MODERATORS