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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the parts-of-the-basic-toolset dept.

Well, that didn't take long: within a week of applause for Microsoft's decision to open-source PowerShell, a comment-war has broken out over curl and wget.

For those not familiar with these commands: they're open source command line tools for fetching Internet content without a browser. Apart from obvious applications like downloading whole sites (for example as backup), they're also under the hood for a lot of other toolsets (an example the author is familiar with – GIS tools use curl and/or wget to fetch maps from Web services).

For some reason, Microsoft's team decided to put aliases for curl and wget in Windows PowerShell – but, as this thread begins, those aliases don't deliver curl and wget functionality.

The pull request says the aliases should be spiked: "They block use of the commonly used command line tools without providing even an attempt to offer the same functionality. They serve no purpose for PowerShell users but cause confusion and problems to existing curl and wget users."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/23/your_wget_is_broken_and_should_die_powershellers_tell_microsoft/

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday August 23 2016, @12:42PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday August 23 2016, @12:42PM (#392085) Journal

    I'm not finding enough details here but what commands are aliased to provide said functionality? And it sounds like are the alias' are hard coded and changing them would break things which is absurd. Then again...

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  • (Score: 2) by rob_on_earth on Tuesday August 23 2016, @01:27PM

    by rob_on_earth (5485) on Tuesday August 23 2016, @01:27PM (#392104) Homepage

    When I started using powershell on windows servers a few years ago and I could not install cygwin, this functionality was heaven sent.

    Both curl and wget are aliased to invoke-webrequest which I had no idea existed. It takes none of the parameters that real curl or wget want but just typing

    curl http://www.google.com [google.com]
    wget http://www.google.com [google.com]
    iwr http://www.google.com [google.com]
    invoke-webrequest http://www.google.com [google.com]

    all download the google home page

    Which is all well and good except what you actually see on screen it a snip it of n bytes(500ish) you have to request the rawdata property of the returned object to see all the bytes.

    It is good, bad and ugly but is only useful on Windows.