Windows Vista PowerShell tested

PowerShell 1.0, which was formerly known by the code name Monad, extends to administrators, developers and enthusiasts a powerful new interface for their Windows machines that's based on stringing together small, well-defined applications into pipelines—a handy capability on which Linux and Unix administrators have long relied.

However, unlike Linux and Unix shells such as bash or korn, in which strung-together applications pass data to each other as raw text, PowerShell boasts an object-based approach that enables elements to communicate more intelligently with each other.

For instance, in both the bash shell (the default for most Linux distributions) and in PowerShell, you can sort items in a folder by size by piping the output of a "list items" command to a "sort" command.