First look at powershell 6.1.0

September 15, 2018 — Jesse Harris

Powershell 6.1.0 dropped yesterday. Here is my quick look.

New Commands

Get-Command | Measure-Object on each version:

Version 6.0.4 had 316 commands, while 6.1.0 has 323 commands. Comparing a list of commands:

On 6.0.4: gcm | select -exp name > 6.0.4.txt and the same on 6.1.0, then to compare:

    compare-object (gc ./6.0.4.txt) (gc ./6.1.0.txt)

    InputObject             SideIndicator
    -----------             -------------
    ConvertFrom-Markdown    =>
    Get-ExperimentalFeature =>
    Get-MarkdownOption      =>
    Set-MarkdownOption      =>
    Show-Markdown           =>
    Start-ThreadJob         =>
    Test-Connection         =>
    Test-Json               =>
    more                    <=

Firstly, yay for Test-Connection. I had to reimplement that one by parsing results from ping previously to make some of my windows modules work on PS core. Start-ThreadJob looks interesting and I can't wait to see what the Markdown cmdlets do.

I'll look more at these new commands later, but while I was running Get-Command, I thought I'd see if there were any generic performance improvements in 6.1.0 release.

On 6.0.4:

    PS /home/harrisj> measure-command {gcm | select -exp name}                      
    Days              : 0
    Hours             : 0
    Minutes           : 0
    Seconds           : 0
    Milliseconds      : 718
    Ticks             : 7185832
    TotalDays         : 8.31693518518518E-06
    TotalHours        : 0.000199606444444444
    TotalMinutes      : 0.0119763866666667
    TotalSeconds      : 0.7185832
    TotalMilliseconds : 718.5832

On 6.1.0:

    PS /home/harrisj> measure-command {get-command | select -exp name }

    Days              : 0
    Hours             : 0
    Minutes           : 0
    Seconds           : 0
    Milliseconds      : 455
    Ticks             : 4558407
    TotalDays         : 5.27593402777778E-06
    TotalHours        : 0.000126622416666667
    TotalMinutes      : 0.007597345
    TotalSeconds      : 0.4558407
    TotalMilliseconds : 455.8407

A modest speed boost. Definitely appreciated on the old RPI 2 that hosts this site.

Kicking the tires on new command

Show-Markdown

I gave this a quick try and it colour highlighted and shows a preview of the markdown in the terminal window. It also had a -UseBrowser parameter which writes a tmp html and open's it in the browser. Pretty neat.

ConvertFrom-Markdown

What you'd expect, this converts a Markdown file to html to stdout or to a file if specified. Who knows, I might see if I can get this site to work using this implementation of Markdown. Currently I'm using the Markdown.pl from Gruber.

Get-ExperimentalFeature

Does nothing on the RPI and MacOS. Will have to spin this up on Windows and update this article

Test-Json

Just ran this over a json file I use in one of my projects:

Test-Json -Json (gc ./Template.json -raw)
True

Start-ThreadJob

This might take a bit more time to find the true value of it, but I quickly tried my simultaneous ping test with this and it spawned a number of PSJobs with a PSJobTypeName of ThreadJob.

Closing thouhghts

Thats it for now. I've heard this release focused alot on bringing Windows cmdlets back for Windows, so not-so-much in this one for the *nixes. Still an improvement either way

Tags: powershell

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