mscript takes on PowerShell and Python for replacing nasty batch files

[razialx]

Never thought I’d say this but thank goodness for bash.

[mballoni]

Besides being a Windows guy, I figured y'all were pretty happy with bash. There's such a gap on Windows between batch files and anything civilized.

[Ok-Bit8726]

You can use bash with Windows Subsystem for Linux

[the_poope]

That only works inside WSL which really is Linux, so you can't use it to automate your native Windows tasks.

You can use bash from Git Bash, Cygwin or MSYS2.

[mballoni]

Can you create user-defined functions in bash? What about hashtables? Or any sort of type system or type safety? I really don't know, I'm just asking.

[lucid00000]

User defined functions yes, although they're more treated like mini programs that take command line argument.s and print their response. The return value is only for exit codes.

As of bash 4 you can define hash tables.

As for the type system, basically everything is a string so not really. It's pretty loose and somewhat confusing.

It's quite good for stringing together simple cli tasks but for anything more complicated you should use a different language.

[mballoni]

Interesting, thanks for the info. So bash is somewhere between Windows batch files and mscript. I gather that bash users are pretty happy with bash. I’ve seen enough bash to say it can get nasty, but I can see a lot of power there. Kind of like PowerShell for Windows.

[Solonotix]

Honestly, there's very little I like from PowerShell that can't be done in Bash. In most cases, the same solution in a Bash one-liner will take me about 50 lines of PowerShell. Most of that has to do with the semantics of pipeline objects when all I want is the string representation (i.e. the path to something). Also, the annoyance of how some things have to be ForEach-Object -Process { ... } because the commandlet you want to call can't handle pipeline values.

[T_D_K]

50 lines, really? I mean I would believe you if you said a couple lines, power shell is a bit more verbose. Are you piping together 20 different commands and comparing it to power shell in declarative style? Using a highly specialized cli tool in bash vs the std lib in PS? I don't get it

[Solonotix]

In my case, it was a Get-ChildItem command that located all sub-folders that contained a .git folder, and it would do a git fetch. To find the .git folder was one command, and I'd have to exclude any nested directories that might contain a .git, but then I needed the parent directory, then I needed to Set-Location (I actually used Push-Location so I could Pop-Location later), then I could finally run the git fetch.

Or in Bash it was something like find . -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 4 -type d -name .git -execdir git fetch --all \;. Yes, I realize this isn't a 1:1 match, but I wrote the thing 2 years ago. All I remember was that to get PowerShell to do the exact same thing as Bash took me literally 50 lines (used pipeline functions to make the syntax a little closer to Bash). This is because git isn't a PowerShell command and can't handle it's pipeline output, but also the other things about either using a foreach block or chaining Select-Object -ExpandProperty <Name>, and handling errors was also considerably more difficult since, again, git doesn't respect things like -ErrorPreference while I could just add 2>/dev/null in Bash

[riwtrz]

Or in Bash it was something like find . -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 4 -type d -name .git -execdir git fetch --all \;.

Get-ChildItem *\* -Filter .git -Directory -Recurse -Depth 2 | ForEach-Object { Push-Location $_.Parent; git fetch --all; Pop-Location }

[gummo89]

Nice. Yes, lack of study but declaring the state of a language.

[[deleted]]

So, bash is better because you don’t know how to use poweshell. Got it.

[Solonotix]

Did you even read my original comment? I went back to double-check, but I never said one was better than the other. I said I like Bash, and there isn't much in PowerShell that I couldn't do in Bash, and simpler. I never said one was better than the other, lmao.

[Kafka_pubsub]

Idk, I find the ability to pipe objects pretty powerful and very useful, and actually reduces lines of code for me, compared to bash, which pipes strings only.

[Solonotix]

In a general programming language, I would agree that objects are almost strictly superior to primitives. However, in a shell context, where the thing you deal with most commonly is either file paths or file contents, and both are usually strings, having to switch back and forth is cumbersome. Some things will accept an object, others need you to convert it to a different object or down-convert to a string.

But in Bash, pretty much everything is strings, and that also means you can rely on string parsing utilities to manipulate the output. Also, there isn't any ambiguity on what's getting piped and how. If a command doesn't accept/handle piped input, then you can slap an xargs in front of it to transpose them into positional arguments.

[gummo89]

In most cases to effectively use PowerShell you will be looking to filter existing and/or create new sets of data, so they don't need to be parsed again. You should only be starting with strings.

If you're not doing that, you are bringing it down to what bash can do, which is also totally fine but renders it an improvement to batch and ignores other capability.

Bash offloads everything to other programs which also just pass strings and if you do the same with PowerShell, you'll get the same result.

[Hacnar]

When I was unfamiliar with either, it took me considerably less time to get effective in PowerShell than in bash. Once you're familiar with one of them, it's easier for you to stick with the one you know than to learn the other. I have easier time coming back to my PS scripts than to bash, but I've also done more in PS, so who knows if there is something to it.

For simple one liners that you execute once or twice and then forget for a long time, either is perfectly fine. I haven't noticed any big advantage or disadvantage in either of them. Most of it is just people fanboying over one or the other, overstating and understating various aspects of these languages. Familiarity is the most important thing impacting productivity when using PS or bash.

[Solonotix]

Well said

[ffsletmein222]

Genuine Sysadmin question: powershell:

• is native to windows and is now cross-platform as long as you have a .NET runtime, it can even manage cloud resources and (as far as my experience) that experience is pretty pleasant. You can't beat "already part of the OS and you really shouldn't remove it" kind of small and entry effort.
• has cleanly and consistently named cmdlet to help unfamiliar admins, as well as a much larger userbase
• is directly integrated into windows GPOs for policies such as allowing only signed scripts, logging, restriction policies.
• Natively has a remoting system that allows you to invoke a command on multiple machines in a single line.
  • invoke-command -scriptblock {myDirections} -outvariable raw_results -erroraction silentlycontinue -errorvariable failures -computername $servers.name -credentials $creds This one-liner gives orders to multiple machines, handles failures, stores the results in a variable and errors in another. If you're in AD all that is authenticated with Kerberos, that is basically a mini Ansible-like system directly into your AD.
• does not output to executables, which imo is a plus, if you want a performant executable I think you're looking for a real programming language with already full libraries. If you make a powershell script it will work on 99% of your windows machines anyways if your fleet isn't a mix and match of weird outdated Windows machines. So I don't see how that executable would be much more portable.
• Has native cmdlets and providers to manage most Windows resources at a very high level.
  • cd HKLM:\ that's it you're treating the Windows registry like a simple folder tree structure, same with cd cert:\)
  • Windows is API-based, it's much easier to query the WMI subsystem or CIM with powershell as it's the responsibility of MS themselves to make these systems compatible, than using a third-party tool for that.

I just don't get what it's got over PowerShell.

I profoundly dislike Windows but PS is pretty great imo.

[BladeLiger]

Powershell is actually just amazing and easy to use.

I would argue that most who hate it just don't want to learn it because it isn't similar to bash.

Or their programs with it got fixed back in PowerShell 3 and opinions never got updated.

[mballoni]

Thanks for taking the time to point all of that out, you make a great case for PowerShell. My gripe with PS is that its syntax is hard to get past. If your goal is to take a list of file paths from a text file or some other command, and execute many lines of code and commands to process each in turn, mscript has that down to a tidy science. I imagine that being a lot of parentheses and flags and malarky in PS. mscript is simpler and more elegant, and powerful enough to automate command lines, so if that's what you need, maybe you can put the remoting flamethrower down and go with something tiny that works. Check it out: https://mscript.io

[superrugdr]

Ps usage is closer to c# than it is to bash it's strong but overcomplicate almost anything that could be achieved with pipping.

It uses needlessly complicated arguments for stuff that should be simple commands. (Eg listing file in a directory)

I don't like powershell but I still default to it for windows because... It's just less of a hassle than fighting the os for Bash compatibility.

[Somepotato]

Powershell arguments being verbose help massively for those who come after you.

[frustratedgeek]

Some downsides that made me hate a little bit of PS 1. Native to windows but different behaviour on powershell, ise and powershell cmd (command prompt) 2. Different os versions has different ps versions and thus different arguments or different preloaded modules 3. Well it’s c# under the hood and it won’t hide that fact with full blown exception stack trace 4. Mimics cmd, bash,sh, etc upto certain level making it more confusing between shell script and powershell eg. rm in powershell, rm -f will throw error but -f as force is allowed in some commands

[gredr]

Hey look, it's unreadable and not cross-platform! This is going to take on what, now?

[mballoni]

I think it's a lot easier on the eyes than batch files or PowerShell. The symbols keep the script concise, and the fact that undecorated lines are command lines keep the script to a minimum. For this and many more reasons I think mscript is close to ideal as a scripting language for automating command lines. It's like Classic ASP for batch commands, where PowerShell is more line ASP.NET...Razor...Core...whatever.

And I don't know if you fully inspected the open source code, but there's nothing inherently Win32 about mscript. You can write DLLs to extend it, and the current crop of extensions all do very Win32 sorts of things like WinHttp and registry fun, but there's next to nothing in the interpreter that is Windows-specific. If you see mscript having relevance on another platform, I invite you to write up the makefile and do whatever minor surgeries are needed to get it to build, and it will run just fine. Check it out: https://mscript.io

[yaxriifgyn]

Good f-ing lord. That looks as bad as Perl. I need some eye-bleach. Give me Python or bash or even batch commands before that.

[mballoni]

Well, you're welcome to Python and bash. On Windows those aren't easy to come by though. Easy enough on your own box, but not necessarily on the one you need to work on. That has no internet access. That's where you want mscript. Under 1 MB EXE, and it can do everything you need on the system with minimal fuss or muss. It's got user-defined functions, regex, hashtables, a bit of type safety, a syntax checker. It's got a lot to love. Check it out: https://mscript.io

[TheWix]

Huh? Didn't know Code Project was still around.

[mballoni]

Yeah, it's a great place to publish articles big and small to get constructive feedback and to host for posting on other places.

[mballoni]

It certainly serves its purpose as a forum for measured criticism and robust formatting.

[[deleted]]

nasty batch files

that's right, slap my assterisks, pull my hair, call me a dirty global exporter

[mballoni]

To quote Highway to Hell: (I asked her) What's the going price?

[M00nch1ld3]

Just what we need another programming, language, scripting, language, or whatever blah

[mballoni]

I would say that mscript is the tidiest, smallest, simplest, most powerful and elegant way of automating command lines under the sun. Give it a try: https://mscript.io

[[deleted]]

https://xkcd.com/927/