Windows Powershell vs Command Prompt: What's The Difference Anyway?

IS POWERSHELL JUST A BLUE COMMAND PROMPT?

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#Windows #Tech #ThioJoe

[latt.qcd]

CMD Prompt: "Who are you?"
Powershell: "I'm you, but bluer."

[Falaxuper]

I can't wrap my mind around how this guy went from telling people to pickle their iPhones in hand sanitizer for free mobile data to making actually informative, well-structured videos

[gosnooky]

The .​/ is from Linux - and must be specified to execute within the current directory as opposed to an executable in $PATH. This is to help avoid name collisions.

[Tarucz]

Microsoft: We are removing command prompt.

People in 2025: Only the OG remember command prompt.

[RobertGrimm]

The things you find weird in Powershell are standard ways of doing things from Unix that have been around forever. Using -eq in an if statement is useful because you can use other things in place of it to do other tests. Instead of checking to see if a string or numeric value is equal to something else, you could test something like whether a file exists or what kind of file something is. That's strange for other kinds of languages but it makes good sense in a shell scripting language.

As for having to specify the local directory with .\ to run a program in the current directory, that's a security feature that has also been around forever in Unix. Imagine you're sitting in your home directory and you want to run something like ping. The standard Windows version is in your $PATH but your current location isn't. Maybe something malicious put a bad version of ping in your home directory. You want the real one, not the dangerous one, so running things in the local directory is blocked unless directly specified and the system looks to the $PATH to find it.

[neoqueto]

Big brain mode:
PS C:\Users\User> cmd

[smft]

You can't even watch star wars in powershell :/

[shreevardhanshenoy]

For those in a hurry

Powershell = blue command prompt with yellow font

[Caracazz]

I'm learning english and this is the only channel I can understand everything without subtitles. You have a good diction.

[MichaelStepniewski]

Command prompt also supports pipes. It just does text instead of objects which powershell does like you mentioned in the video. Just wanted to share that you can use piped output far before powershell ever existed.

[SYS_Alberto]

Command Prompt: black
Powershell:
I'm blue
Da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di

[tsMichael]

Teacher: opening another tab will close the main tab
Me with powershell doing math: i can’t hear you

[enzoys]

I'm always amazed by how much more information I actually get from your videos than I could ever expect, good job!

[zsin]

easy: one looks cool, and can change theme without activining windows.
other one looks anicent but its faster

/s

[patrickflannigan]

Great informative video. I'm a systems administrator and I got my most recent job thanks to powershell. During my interview I displayed how I had automated the deployment and configuration of virtual machines to automatically spin up game servers all in powershell and python. Without powershell I wouldn't have the decent lifestyle I have today. This video is a great primer on the basic concepts of powershell, it was really well done. You're clearly knowledgeable about what you're talking about and well researched. Keep up the great work.

[arijitdas]

How I use powershell...
"Start cmd"

[tooru]

1. There's nothing wrong at all with nested if-s in Batch:
if 1 == 1 (
if 2 == 2 (
echo yas
) else (
echo no
)
)
2. You have to launch programs with *./* because otherwise it's a security vulnerability. Imagine you download some archive with many many files, you extract it and _cd_ into it. Then you run _dir_ but this archive already comes with its own dir.exe, which in turn could be malicious, so that's why current directory is not automatically added to your PATH.

[RuxUnderscore]

To add to this video for those that are more technical. A lot of the syntax and aliases used by PowerShell were created to provide less of a learning curve for those of us more attuned to bash scripting/Linux terminals. If you look at a PowerShell script compared to a more advanced bash script you can see similarities other than the PowerShell-only commands. (echo instead of Write-Host and so on). With this knowledge, someone who is adept with either scripting language can fill in the blanks and learn the other with relative ease.

[tallgeese]

The "./" token is a PowerShell security feature that insures the intended application or script is run from the current directory and not an application of the same name in the system or user path that could be potential malware or incompatible application version that may be on a system.

Not stupid.

[MrNaporowski]

Those oddities in PowerShell you mentioned (like writing -eq instead of =) aren't really oddities because as it turns out this is how you write in bash (the most popular Linux command shell) as well. However, in bash you can also use a legacy method with = instead of -eq, for example, but the syntax is a little different.

The same is the case with adding ./ before running a script.