Microsoft implores you to stop using Cmd and switch to PowerShell
Rich Turner, a senior program manager at Microsoft, has taken to Twitter to practically beg people to move away from Cmd to PowerShell. Why? Well Cmd is an ancient hangover from the days of MS-DOS, for a start!
He explains that Cmd is in maintenance mode, and only continues to exist for the purpose of backward compatibility. Stating "PowerShell is the future", he states categorically that the old command line interpreter "should not be used for interactive shell work".
Turner's tweets were not unprompted. Rather than issuing the advice out of the blue, it came in response to other tweets that complained about the number of command line options in Windows, and the lack of interoperability between them.
He tweeted:
I'll keep saying this until y'all stop using Cmd:
Cmd is in maintenance mode. It's job is to preserve back compat with ancient & immutable scripts. That's it. Period. It should not be used for interactive shell work.
PowerShell is the future.
— Rich Turner (@richturn_ms) May 26, 2020
In a further tweet, Turner expressed his belief that Cmd stuck around for longer than it should have:
No. Cmd's LITERAL reason to exist was to run MS-DOS scripts and commands to aid people coming to NT from DOS/Win9x.
It shouldn't have lived so long.
— Rich Turner (@richturn_ms) May 26, 2020
Have you embraced PowerShell yet, or are you holding doggedly on?