First look at powershell 6.1.0
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