Microsoft wants to renew its battery of technologies aimed at software development, so together with .NET 6 came PowerShell 7.2 , the latest version of its next-generation command interpreter that has been for years Open Source , which has allowed it to be ported to Linux and macOS (although the company has reserved some letters). Although its development is linked to the well-known framework of the Redmond giant, it can be used as a system shell, replacing other solutions such as Bash and Zsh.
In the entry of .NET 6 we already made a preview of PowerShell 7.2, which among its characteristics has the fact that it is compiled with the aforementioned version of the framework . The latest release of the shell is also LTS and we assume that it will be kept for the same amount of time considering its seemingly close relationship with .NET 6.
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PowerShell 7.2 is not only an LTS release, but it has also come with some interesting news, such as new universal installer packages for Linux, support for Windows Microsoft Update, improved tab completions, PSReadLine 2.1 with predictive IntelliSense and has been separated the PowerShell 7 Desired State Configuration (DSC) to enable future enhancements.
Regarding universal packages for Linux, the Redmond giant has explained that they previously released separate installers for CentOS, RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu. With the new approach, the company has created a universal mechanism that “combines eight different packages into one, making it easy to install on Linux. The universal package installs the necessary dependencies for the target distribution and creates the platform-specific changes for PowerShell to work ” .
The latest version of Microsoft’s command interpreter has also incorporated several experimental features, two of which have been specified in one of the official announcements: Improved support for passing arguments in native commands and support for ANSI FileInfo colors. On the other hand, seven experimental features have been promoted to standard and one has been eliminated. Added to all of the above are the typical improvements and corrections that one finds in each new release of software.
Those interested in PowerShell 7.2 can check out the official announcements posted on Microsoft’s developer blog and the corporation’s official documentation , as well as take a look at the list of changes . The shell is available for Linux, Windows, Mac, and in a Docker container format.
