Cool, thanks for the info. It is very intriguing, and I admit that until this HN thread I didn't know about powershell, or appreciate this totally different model for how to connect programs together.
This is probably way off-topic now, and my question surely shows my ignorance, but do you know if there precedent for a program, once packaged to work within powershell (or maybe nushell), to use the associated input and output specification as the starting point for making a web interface to the same code (as bridged by a webserver)? Or have I just described .net ?
I'm no expert on web dev, mostly working in BI/DBA.
Running commands over WinRM or SSH can return objects of any type from remote machines. In the background I believe it's converting them to serialized CLIXML over the wire.
e.g. $RemotePSVersion = Invoke-Command -ComputerName 'SomeOtherComputer' -ScriptBlock {$PSVersionTable}
Rather than the variable $RemotePSVersion being a string it's an object with the type "System.Management.Automation.PSVersionHashTable", just like if you ran $PSVersionTable locally.
For anything that returns text (e.g. external tools like curl/robocopy) you'll usually convert to an object in your script before further processing. That way it can be passed into whatever next steps in a generic way.
That's less important when working interactively, but one major difference between Powershell/Bash is the relative focus on scripting vs interactive terminal use.
It's for wrappers around existing CLI tools.
Still feels experimental, but it's a nice idea to get objects from e.g. robocopy without dropping into regex and parsing it yourself.