The Command-Line Shell We Have at Home
Description
This image uses the 'Mom, can we have...' or 'We have food at home' meme format to compare two command-line shells. The first line shows the text 'Mom, can we have' followed by the logo for BASH (The Bourne-Again Shell). The second line says, 'No. There is BASH At Home'. The final part, under the heading 'At home...', displays the logo for Microsoft's PowerShell. The meme humorously portrays PowerShell as the inferior, disappointing substitute for Bash. This plays on a common sentiment in the developer and sysadmin communities, particularly among those who prefer the Linux/Unix ecosystem, where Bash is a long-standing standard. While PowerShell is a powerful object-oriented shell, its syntax and design philosophy are very different from traditional POSIX shells, making it a frequent target of jokes from the Bash user base. A small watermark for 't.me/dev_meme' is in the bottom left corner
Comments
7Comment deleted
Bash pipes text. PowerShell pipes objects. So, when your script fails in Bash, you have a broken pipe. When it fails in PowerShell, you have a deeply nested exception from a .NET class you've never heard of
“Sure, kid, we’ve got Bash at home - the one where `ls` hands you a pile of .NET objects, `grep` insists it’s called `Select-String`, and every `rm -rf /` adds a polite `-WhatIf` so corporate IT can sleep at night.”
After 20 years of writing bash scripts, nothing quite captures the existential dread of opening a terminal on Windows and realizing your muscle memory for 'ls' and 'grep' is about to betray you, while PowerShell sits there with its verbose Get-ChildItem cmdlets, reminding you that object-oriented shells were Microsoft's answer to a question nobody asked
The eternal struggle: You've spent 15 years mastering Bash's elegant pipe chains and sed one-liners, only to join a Windows-first enterprise where your muscle memory for `ls -la` is met with 'Get-ChildItem -Force' and your beautiful `grep -r` becomes 'Select-String -Recurse'. Sure, PowerShell has object pipelines and .NET integration, but when you're trying to quickly parse logs at 2 AM during an incident, typing 'Get-Content | Where-Object' instead of 'cat | grep' feels like being forced to write a formal letter when you just want to send a text. At least PowerShell has tab completion that actually works - small mercies for the Bash refugee
PowerShell pipelines: .NET objects over text streams - type safety trumps one-liner elegance every time
Asked for Bash; got PowerShell - the moment your 'set -euo pipefail' becomes $ErrorActionPreference='Stop' and every pipe returns objects that 'grep' can't digest
PowerShell is Bash at home: you’re promised “objects in the pipeline,” and then someone drops a Format-Table and you’re parsing strings again at 3 a.m. during the release window