Powershell solves these problems by having structured data and types and not just streams of bytes

>> Powershell solves these problems by having structured data and types and not just streams of bytes

Powershell's structured data can cause issues if you expect it to be similar to Unix-like shells.

For example, Powershell mangles piped binary data by default:

https://brianreiter.org/2010/01/29/powershells-object-pipeli...

Correct handling of piped binary data requires additional flags:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54086430/how-to-pipe-bin...

Isn't this exactly what the parent was saying? "Stream of bytes" is not a meaningful thing that Powershell deals with by default. Using an operation like "pipe to file" on a text stream (like the Success output stream) will treat the stream as text, regardless of whether you managed to get raw binary data into the stream. This is kind of the whole point of Powershell: there is no such thing as raw binary data, and you have to work harder if you want to deal with something as bytes. It's certainly a culture shock coming from "everything is a stream of bytes" Unix-land.

>> This is kind of the whole point of Powershell: there is no such thing as raw binary data, and you have to work harder if you want to deal with something as bytes. It's certainly a culture shock coming from "everything is a stream of bytes" Unix-land.

Exactly. It means that system administrators need to be aware of the differences when working with Powershell versus other shells to avoid silent corruption of binary data.

Yes, and? A Python developer needs to learn a different language if they become a java developer. A sysadmin needs to learn Windows if they're going to administer Windows.

Powershell is cross-platform and runs on Linux and MacOS as well as Windows:

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

You can discover differences between Powershell and traditional shells as a Linux admin.