http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/05/02/top-five-gotchas-when-learning-powershell/ The blog of John D. Cook Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:13:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/05/02/top-five-gotchas-when-learning-powershell/#comment-343 Keith Hill Mon, 05 May 2008 23:49:26 +0000 http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/05/02/top-five-gotchas-when-learning-powershell/#comment-343 I agree with all except #2. I've never had nor heard of many issues with ` as an escape character and thank goodness they didn't use \ as an escape character (like in Korn shell). One gotcha that I would consider perhaps in the top five is calling out to external apps that take parameters. Sometimes PowerShell's parsing gets in the way like if your parameters use semi-colon e.g. /workspace:hillr1;hillr. PoSh sees the semi-colon as a statement separator and considers hillr the start of a new command. Ugh, this has caused me and a lot of folks grief (which is why we added echoargs.exe to PSCX). Another popular gotcha is using expressions within double quotes. I see folks doing this "Host version is $host.version" not realizing that it should be "Host version is $($host.version)". Just my 2 cents. BTW good stuff you're writing on Posh. Keep it up! I agree with all except #2. I’ve never had nor heard of many issues with ` as an escape character and thank goodness they didn’t use \ as an escape character (like in Korn shell). One gotcha that I would consider perhaps in the top five is calling out to external apps that take parameters. Sometimes PowerShell’s parsing gets in the way like if your parameters use semi-colon e.g. /workspace:hillr1;hillr. PoSh sees the semi-colon as a statement separator and considers hillr the start of a new command. Ugh, this has caused me and a lot of folks grief (which is why we added echoargs.exe to PSCX). Another popular gotcha is using expressions within double quotes. I see folks doing this “Host version is $host.version” not realizing that it should be “Host version is $($host.version)”. Just my 2 cents. BTW good stuff you’re writing on Posh. Keep it up!

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