Powershell vs anything else?

If you have read my first post, you know that I've just testet Microsoft Powershell. I am an "old" DOS-veteran and DOS batching has for some time now started to get too limited for me, so I thought I would check out Powershell.

I have just testet it for one day or so, but I can't find myself comfortable with it. Earlier this day, I was gonna use telnet to test a SMTP-server. The only problem is that usual commands like for example telnet does not exist in powershell. If I was going to use Powershell it should be a little more like DOS, but the scripting should be a little like Visual Basic so you won't get into trouble if you want do replace special characters like = or \.

I know you can do this in DOS, but it is just too much fuzz just to find out how to do it. Also if you find a tool that can do it, it may not work without a bunch of wildcards that I don't have the time to spend a lot of research on.

Some of you may suggest Cygwin, vbscript or maybe a DOS clone. I don't like vbscript. I want to do the scripting command-line like, so maybe Cygwin is the right choice? Just this moment I tested Win-bash. It didn't work so well most likely because of special Norwegian characters (most likely it is fixable too).

I like bash (Linux), but don't have so much scripting experience in it.. But with the little I have done, it seems easy and logical.

Does anybody have any recommendations for me on this topic?
I will be looking in to an alternate scripting environment for Windows the next days. I don't think I will be sticking to powershell or plain DOS batching, but I'm not sure of anything right now..

Edit: It seems like I'm going for Telnet afterall. I've testet VBscript the last days and it is simple enough, but Powershell seems to be more simple and I like better to work in a "terminal" rather than scripting in Windows. I feel that a "terminal" gives me more control over what I am doing.


The transition will be real simple for me, in scripting and everything since I can use DOS-commands in Powershell like this: "cmd /c dir c:\temp". Or for scripting: "$testvariable=cmd /c dir c:\temp".