PowerShell

PowerShell is Microsoft's cross-platform shell and scripting language. It runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows—and the reason you'd install it on a Mac is either because you manage Windows servers, work with Azure, or because PowerShell's object-oriented pipeline is genuinely better than bash for certain tasks. The key difference between PowerShell and traditional Unix shells (bash, zsh, fish): PowerShell pipes objects, not text. When you run `Get-Process` in PowerShell, it returns .NET objects with properties like Name, CPU, Memory, and Id. When you pipe that to `Where-Object { $_.CPU -gt 100 }`, you're filtering on an actual numeric property, not parsing text output with awk or grep. When you run `ls` in bash and pipe to `grep`, you're searching text strings. When you run `Get-ChildItem` in PowerShell and pipe to `Where-Object`, you're querying file objects with strongly-typed properties like Length, LastWriteTime, and Extension. This object pipeline makes PowerShell better for structured data manipulation. Want to find all files larger than 10MB modified in the last week, sorted by size? In PowerShell: `Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.Length -gt 10MB -and $_.LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Date).AddDays(-7) } | Sort-Object Length -Descending`. The equivalent in bash requires `find` with `-mtime`, `xargs`, `stat`, and careful quoting. PowerShell is more verbose but less error-prone because you're working with structured data instead of parsing text. PowerShell is built on .NET, which gives it access to the entire .NET class library. You can make HTTP requests with `Invoke-RestMethod`, parse JSON natively, interact with databases, manipulate XML, and use any .NET library. Modules extend PowerShell with cmdlets for specific services: Az (Azure), AWS.Tools (AWS), VMware.PowerCLI (VMware), ActiveDirectory, and hundreds more from the PowerShell Gallery. Oh-My-Posh provides prompt customization for PowerShell (similar to Oh-My-Zsh). PSReadLine adds bash-like keybindings and history search. The combination makes PowerShell on macOS a comfortable cross-platform shell, not just a scripting tool you use reluctantly.