I don't use it as a shell on Linux/macOS (I don't think it's even really supported yet), but as a scripting environment it's been ok: the language is sane enough, you can use the .NET BCL if you need to and its behavior is consistent across platforms.
We use it for automation in our .NET codebase (which is being developed on both Windows and Linux) instead of bash scripts because of that and the fact it's preinstalled in the .NET SDK Docker images
My default shell. Everything from manipulating XML to system administration. I'm a big fan of the object-based pipeline.
Quick examples:
- Accelerators for data and conversion tasks. For example, reading a file with `Get-Content` (or frequently in the shell, the alias `gc`) and parsing and converting into a traversable, queryable XML: `[xml]$myXml = gc my-file.xml`. Then you can go `$myXml.customers.firstName` or use an XPath query.
- To get the difference between two dates, `[DateTime]::Now - [DateTime]'2021-01-01'` returns a `TimeSpan` with the elapsed hours, days, etc. It parses the date string for you because of the `[DateTime]` before it.
- The cmdlets for system administration. For example, exporting processes that use more than 200 MB of RAM and their image paths to CSV: `Get-Process | where { $_.WorkingSet -gt 200000000 } | select ProcessName, Path | Export-Csv memory-hogs.csv`
We use it for automation in our .NET codebase (which is being developed on both Windows and Linux) instead of bash scripts because of that and the fact it's preinstalled in the .NET SDK Docker images