Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Your wget (and curl) is Broken and Should DIE, GitHubbers Tell Microsoft

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

"exec" writes:

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

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Your wget (and curl) is Broken and Should DIE, GitHubbers Tell Microsoft | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 53 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:20PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:20PM (#392132) Homepage Journal

    As an aside, using bash, perl, python and/or a myriad of other tools on Windows systems creates portable tools which can run, unmodified, pretty much everywhere.

    I guess the use case for a cross-platform powershell is if you only know powershell and/or have a large library of PS scripts.

    However, powershell (IMHO) is pretty painful to use compared with other scripting languages. Better to learn Perl or Python, and shell (Bourne, Korn, C or other), methinks.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Tuesday August 23 2016, @03:07PM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday August 23 2016, @03:07PM (#392159) Homepage Journal

    PowerShell's programming model is better than bash but its got a fundamental design flaw that makes it unpleasant to work with.

    Basically, in PS land, every cmdlet is an object. So I can call for a NS lookup, and then work with that as an object; for scripting that's far better cleaner than shell scripts (and PowerShell is essentially a bash alternative on Windows). The problem is the pipeline. If you don't catch objects, they can "leak". Basically, if I do "Resolve-DNSName" or something similar, and don't catch the return code, the object leaks into the pipeline, and can be retrieved by something completely unrelated and unexpectedly. The behavior is incredibly uninutive when it happens, and its gotten me to the point that I have to catch everything to make sure the pipeline is pristine in all cases.

    --
    Still always moving