The Microsoft PowerShell team has made an unexpected-but-welcome announcement: The team will contribute to the OpenSSH community to create a way to use Windows PowerShell with SSH, for securely connecting to and managing computers running Windows and Linux. If you haven’t used it before, Microsoft’s PowerShell is a command line environment with a powerful scripting language first released in late 2006. It was a welcome relief to anyone who worked in the spare DOS command box, with the latter’s relatively weak Batch language. PowerShell provided the kind of power and programming expressiveness UNIX and Linux users had enjoyed for decades with a rich set of shells, such as the Bourne Shell, C-Shell, and BASH (Bourne Again Shell), and their associated scripting languages.

Meanwhile, OpenSSH is an open source project that produces software tools that use the SSH (Secure Shell) encrypted network protocol, in order to let machines connect in a secure way. Its tools replaces older insecure versions of tools like ftp and telnet, which transmitted passwords and other content in clear text that could be intercepted. The ssh application can be run from the command line to create a secure tunnel to a remote computer over a network.

In the screenshot above, you can see the free and Open Source PuTTY application, which implements SSH, on a Windows 10 (Build 10122) tablet. Here, it’s used to create a secure shell to a Raspberry Pi to manage its Raspbian operating system update. Another useful SSH tool we might expect to see integrated with PowerShell is SCP (Secure Copy), to securely transfer files between Windows and Linux computers. Granted, there are already tools that let you use ssh (like PuTTY) and SCP on Windows today, for securely working with networked computers running Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. But integration with PowerShell should let Windows-centric administrators and power users work more easily in a heterogeneous multi-operating system environment.

So, when can we expect to see this integration? Microsoft’s Group Software Engineering Manager, Angel Calvo, isn’t ready to say exactly when yet. He does say that this effort is in an early stage. So, I wouldn’t expect it to be released along with Windows 10 at the end of July. You might wonder why it took nearly a decade for Microsoft to support something like OpenSSH that might greatly benefit some of its many customers. Based on Calvo’s last paragraph (quoted below), it wasn’t because of a lack of technical ability or desire to do so:

“Finally, I’d like to share some background on today’s announcement, because this is the 3rd time the PowerShell team has attempted to support SSH. The first attempts were during PowerShell V1 and V2 and were rejected. Given our changes in leadership and culture, we decided to give it another try and this time, because we are able to show the clear and compelling customer value, the company is very supportive. So I want to take a minute and thank all of you in the community who have been clearly and articulately making the case for why and how we should support SSH! Your voices matter and we do listen.”