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Other shells

5 roadmaps32 questions

Shells outside the Bourne family, above all PowerShell and its object pipeline. Interviewers ask because cross-platform or Windows-adjacent work is where text-stream habits stop being enough.

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Your team's PowerShell automation is a dozen .ps1 files pasted around in chat. How would you turn that into modules the team installs, and what do you have to decide about hosting and versioning?

level: principalimportance: nice to knowfreq 30%

basics

~20 s

Package the scripts as modules with manifests, then publish them to a repository the team registers once — a private NuGet feed or a file share — so installs and updates go through Install-Module. The decisions are hosting, trust policy, versioning contract, and who publishes.

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Your team maintains a large shared PowerShell codebase. Would you mandate `Set-StrictMode` together with typed, validated parameters across it, and what does that discipline cost?

level: principalimportance: nice to knowfreq 24%

basics

~20 s

Usually yes for shared code: PowerShell is permissive by default, so typos in variable and property names return $null silently and fail far from the cause. Strict mode and validation attributes convert those into immediate errors, at the cost of rejecting some dynamic idioms and of version-sensitive behaviour.

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