PowerShell and Bash are both shells, and are capable of interacting with the kernel. Just like Bash can run on Windows, PowerShell can now run on Linux. While almost all of the aspects of which shell is better than the other is debatable, and the choice of shell is simply a matter of personal preference today, it is true that PowerShell is as powerful as .NET Core can get.

The primary difference between the two shells is that PowerShell outputs objects, while Bash returns text. Manipulation of the output in Bash involves manipulating text first, and then running further commands on the manipulated text to fetch the desired output. PowerShell, on the other hand, handles content as objects and, by design, requires comparatively less manipulation.

Structured data, as noted by Jeffrey Snover (the inventor of Windows PowerShell), is getting more popular as days pass, and structured data is where PowerShell shines the most.

In this recipe, we are going to pick one example to show you how simple and efficient it is to handle file metadata using PowerShell, primarily since the output is an object. We will list the files and folders within our home directory, along with the date and time of modification using both ls in Bash and Get-ChildItem in PowerShell.

We will use PowerShell to run the Linux commands as well.

1. At the Bash prompt, enter ls -l to list all of the files, along with the metadata that the command shows by default:

2. Go to the Terminal that has PowerShell running and type in Get-ChildItem at the prompt:

3. Now, let's pick only the name of the folders and the last modified date and time. This is done in Bash by passing the output of ls -l to awk:

ls -l | awk '{print $6, $7, $8, $9}'

4. Next, let's pick the same information on PowerShell as well:

Get-ChildItem | select LastWriteTime, Name

As you may have noticed, the output is very similar in both cases. However, with PowerShell, you can see the names of the columns as well, which means that you do not have to look for further documentation. Also, the selection of columns is simpler in PowerShell; no text manipulation is required. On the other hand, in Bash, we can use the awk command to manipulate the text output.

5. Let's go one step further and create a subdirectory with a space in the name:

$ mkdir 'test subdirectory'
$ ls -l | awk '{print $6, $7, $8, $9}'

Note that what should have been test subdirectory appears as test. Compare this with the output from PowerShell:

PowerShell reads content from the filesystem as objects, not as text. Therefore, you perform a selection of the desired columns (or, as we shall later see, properties) directly. Bash, on the other hand, outputs text, columns from which are manipulated using a delimiter.

To demonstrate that this is the case, we created a new subdirectory with a space in its name, and we performed the column selection just like we did before, only in this case we did not get the complete name of the new subdirectory. This is because the name contained a whitespace, which is a delimiter in awk.

• The Selecting columns from the output recipe from Chapter 4, Passing Data Through the Pipeline