this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Found while doing forensics on some rediscovered loose flash drives.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Text Based OS > Object Based OS

Everything that is wrong with PowerShell in my opinion is driven by the Object Oriented nature of Windows as an OS.

Since everything in Linux is text, grep is king.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Don’t you think immediately getting the property you’re interested in from an object is easier and more readable than first grepping some output to get the line you want and then removing the leading and trailing garbage on that line manually?

I thing PS scripting would be much more fun if the words weren’t so annoyingly long.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

first grepping some output to get the line you want and then removing the leading and trailing garbage on that line manually

That's not what we do, though. Give me a more concrete example, and I'll let you know how I would expect to do it in a nix environment. I'd be curious to compare. Since I have zero experience with powershell, I am not really sure what to expect. The couple times I've glanced at a powershell script it looked awful, but I could be falling into Paul Graham's blub paradox there. OK, I don't think so, but maybe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For instance: Get the temperature of the “Composite” sensor from this output:

$ sensors
k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
Tctl:         +37.1°C  

BAT1-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
in0:          16.07 V  
curr1:         1.80 A  

amdgpu-pci-0500
Adapter: PCI adapter
vddgfx:        1.46 V  
vddnb:       918.00 mV 
edge:         +35.0°C  
slowPPT:     1000.00 uW 

nvme-pci-0200
Adapter: PCI adapter
Composite:    +28.9°C  (low  =  -5.2°C, high = +79.8°C)
                       (crit = +84.8°C)

acpitz-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
temp1:        +37.0°C  (crit = +120.0°C)

Without a cryptic awk incantation that only wizards can understand, that would be:

sensors | grep Composite | grep -Po 'Composite:.*?C' | grep -Eo '[[:digit:]]{1,2}\.[[:digit:]]'

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think I misunderstood you, when you said "manually", to mean as a human intervention in the process. What you're showing here is an extra processing step, but I wouldn't call that manual. Just want to clear that up, but I'm still down to play.

Instead of three greps, you could use one sed or awk. I don't think there's anything particularly wizardly about awk, and it would be a lot less cryptic, to me, than this chain of greps.

But a much better idea would be to use sensors -j to get json output, intended for machine reading, and pass that to jq. Since I don't have the same sensors output as you, I'm not sure exactly what that would be, but I am guessing probably something like:

sensors -j | jq '."nvme-pci-0200".Composite.composite_input'

I look forward to seeing how you would do this in PS. As I said previously, I don't know it at all, so I'm not sure what you're comparing this to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

What you’re showing here is an extra processing step, but I wouldn’t call that manual.

Yes, it’s not manual by the dictionary definition, but it is an extra step. This is another meaning of manual in my particular bubble [Edit: that I didn’t think to specify].

But a much better idea would be to use sensors -j to get json output, intended for machine reading, and pass that to jq.

This is my initial point, exactly. Dealing with objects is way easier than using the ‘default’ line-wise processing. Only Powershell made that the default, while in Linux you need to hope that utilities have an option to toggle it on – and then also have jq installed to process the objects.

I look forward to seeing how you would do this in PS. As I said previously, I don’t know it at all, so I’m not sure what you’re comparing this to.

[Edit, since I forgot to answer your main point:] I don’t program in PS. I don’t like the verbosity. But I do think MS has a point in pushing objects as the prime unit in processing instead of lines.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

It would be better if they leaned into it. Instead it is object based…. Until it isn’t because then it’s clunky.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Also lots of command line tools have a flag to output json, and then you can do everything powershell can

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

And for those that don't you have JC