18. March 2008
Andy Schneider
Since the release of Powershell there have been a variety of discussions in the community debating which is more powerful, objects or text in a shell environment. Really it depends on what you are managing with the shell.
In the case of the *NIX world, there is a bunch of configuration files that need to be changed, and for this a text based shell is a great thing. A text based shell to manipulate text is completely appropriate.
The world of Windows is a very different story. Windows was not built around configuration files. It is an OS that is accessed and manipulated using API's and a set of objects. This of course leads into why Windows needs an object based shell.
What is really comes down to is using the right tool for the job. I am not so sure I would want to manage a Linux server with Powershell, nor would I really want to manage windows with bash.