Microsoft's new CLI

An anonymous reader writes "Months ago a story ran regarding a job advert at Microsoft for a developer role to lead the work on a new generation of command line interface. It has now been disclosed at the PDC and its name is MSH (Microsoft SHell), codenamed MONAD. Here is the best description so far."

Re:Nothing new except overkill

[SteveX]

The 264kb DLL file is an Explorer add-on that lets you browse the registry using the Explorer. It doesn't let you do anything with the Registry from the command line.

The difference:

[moogla]

msh exploits the transparency and "reflection" abilities of the object oriented features of the OS.

Read down the article for details on how they can now do things like mount the registry as a drive and walk it like a filesystem. Yegads!

bash (or some sh-variant) would have to be adapted to know specific things about linux to compete at that feature level, but it would become non-portable.

This is what the new sysfs interface is supposed to help with. Still, bash isn't object oriented (yet). The closest thing would be like perlsh.

I think people don't give MS enough credit for where they stand even today, frankly.

Monads are an old philosophical concept

[Cranky_92109]

Although it's easy to make the gonad jokes, the concept of monads have a long history [newadvent.org] in metaphysics dating back to the greeks. Monads were central to the philosophy of Liebniz [utm.edu], the co-discoverer of calculus.

Re:Very Nice

[GreyWolf3000]

You get rated 'Insightful' for stating what OpenSource zealots hope. What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?

I'll believe that when I see it. Shells are nice, but they need a bunch of cool tools like sed, wc, tail, grep, etc. Writing such a complete shell would be essentially rewriting DOS.

What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?

That's a really generalized statement. More security inherent in the operating system means more separation of access controls. That means forcing the user to create a non-Administrator account, locking down it's priveleges, often preventing even read access to quite a few things by default. I don't think that's going to happen.

Also, no operating system is totally secure. Holes are found every day in both proprietary and open source and free software. All things being equal (the security of the software design), the security, then, is measured more by the response time once a hole is found,

Do you think the average developer/manager at MS is dumber than your average OS participant? (This is not a tric.. Damn, I'm falling in myself..)

No, but there's a lot more people working on the open source and free software that makes up a GNU/Linux distribution.

But really - if "we" are to compete, we will have to steal the ideas that "work" from MS camp, just as they're "stealing" "our" ideas that WORK.

For us to compete at what? To have a desktop that's just as easy to use as Windows? I'm sorry, smart software makes stupid users. I prefer to use stupid software that doesn't get in my way.

Linux is narrowing the gap to MS on the desktop (albeit slowly), and MS is narrowing the gap to Unix on eg. CLI, stability and security. Their software matures too, you know..

Windows is still ass expensive, and requires even more expensive hardware to run. All things being equal, price will determine the winner. I still see no need to think of all af "Linuxdom" under one umbrella of trying to create a desktop operating system as easy to use as Windows.

And then there's Apple. They make fun stuff. The are not afraid to invent, and they have the money to launch stuff that the OpenSource movement cannot. I don't quite know where to place them compared to OpenSource and MS.

Here's a tip: don't be so eager to compare the two in the first place.

Re:Better served by a standard *nix shell

[stratjakt]

Good point! [microsoft.com]

Unix services for windows has korn shell and c shell, NFS, all kinds of goodies.

Why do all the microsoft bashers here know so little about any of it's products? Or linux for that matter, there is no one "Unix shell".

This shell sounds really cool. And it's just a matter of time before someone "liberates" it and releases a GNU version of it.

Re:Maybe they should call back....

[Anonymous Coward]

MS gave them nothing, shithead - that was just a reckless, unsupported rumor posted on /. because we all KNOW M$ is behind everything evil in the world.

http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com/2110-7344_3-509399 7.html [com.com]

Re:Favorite comments from the Article:

[vidarh]

Of course we already have something close to Intellisense in Bash: Custom tab completion. Take a look at the bash completion package on Freshmeat, and you have something way better than the default tab completion...

Re:Favorite comments from the Article:

[SiW]

Call me crazy, but the last thing I want is Clippy monitoring my typing in tcsh.

I won't call you crazy, but I will claim that you don't know what Intellisense actually does [microsoft.com].

Re:This made me laugh ....

[wasabii]

What sounds better than obscoure grep commands? If you didn't notice, they didn't give you any examples. grep works like this: | grep Bob.

How does the MS shell work? I can only guess, but since it's .net It will be something like this:

$p = getFiles(".");
for ($i in $p.split("\n"))
if ( $i.contains("Bob"))
echo $i

I'm not sure which one I see as easier here, are you? :)

"Easy for developers to extend?" You mean, writing a file with #!/bin/bash at the top, and then writing your code? Yeah, that's really hard. :)

Instead developers are going to have to inherit from a few objects, implement a few interfaces, deal with strict types. This is stuff for PROGRAMMERS, not SYSADMINS. Shells are for SYSADMINS.

Certainly all the MS users are going to love it. But, really, it comes down to being .VBS scripts at the command line. At the end of the day, it will still take 1 unix admin to do the work of 10 windows admins.

Re:Favorite comments from the Article:

[kawika]

I really thought that the first post was sarcarstic, until I read the hordes of "Me Too" replies that followed. Call me crazy, but the last thing I want is Clippy monitoring my typing in tcsh.

We're not talking MS Word, more like MS VS.NET. There are complex objects being exposed in msh and they want some sort of way to "browse" or autocomplete the object hierarchy at the command line to reduce typing and other errors.

Re:Better served by a standard *nix shell

[Zocalo]

You mean like zsh [sourceforge.net], compiled natively for Win32? Along with a whole bunch of other GNU tools for that matter. I've seen native versions of csh and ksh too, but the bash port seems to rely on CygWin, which makes it a little more bulky, but still very useable.

Re:so, when will we see GNU's version

[it0]

Well, there is already zoidberg [utwente.nl]

Re:Microsoft has come a long way

[merlin_jim]

Recently, Microsoft has actually begun to produce command line tools for system operations, controlling your services, networks, policies, and registry from the command prompt [...] and still don't provide the full set of features.

One of Microsoft's design requirements for Windows Server 2003 was that EVERYTHING can be done from the commandline, that the GUI interfaces would have NO functionality that the commandline interface does not.

The Windows .NET Server bootcamp covers the GUI and commandline versions of all the tools, plus provides a take-away reference to each utility.

But they still have a long way to go, these features are poorly documented

Here's a list of the command line utilities in Windows Server 2003:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.a sp?url= /library/en-us/xpehelp/html/_server_command.asp

Searching on individual names, or typing the name with a "/?" on the command line will yield more documentation.

Here's a link to the root reference for the WMIC utilities which are a little more powerful and easily scripted than the command line utilities:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?ur l= /library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/using_the_wmi_command_li ne_utilities.asp

Re:Nothing new except overkill

[RevAaron]

And as for returning search results as .NET objects? This seems rather like using a baseball bat to swat a fly...

Certainly doesn't seem that way to me. It's not like a .NET object is an 800 lb gorilla. It's jut an object. And being an object, rather than a file or text in a certain format, binary or text, it's ready to be used in your script or application, without having to read in, parse, or otherwise make the output or file actually useful.

When writing shell scripts on Linux or Mac OS X, there have been a million times where I've wished the output of a redirected/piped Unix command was available to me in an immediately useful way- rather than to have to write a bunch of regexes or parsing function. It's a pain in the ass. I'd love for ps to return a dictionary (hash, map) of my processes, I could spend my time writing the code that actually did something, rather than parsing the text.

A ,NET object is just an object. Really not all that much more overhead compared to using printfs or spitting it out to a file and then writing your own code to process that text. Why not cut out the middle man?

Re:Much of this could be done in linux...

[iabervon]

I often have to solve complicated problems. But not once have I wanted to solve a complex problem and been sufficiently sure of my shell scripting skills to want to type the command interactively. I recently wrote a 60 line script (with lots of comments) to choose a template file based on pattern matching the desired filename against a directory listing of template files, and then expand the patterns in the file based on the names.

I wrote it in bash, because I'm masochistic that way, but I would never have considered actually typing it directly at a shell prompt. I think I've used a loop in an interactive shell on only one occasion. The fundamental problem is that as soon as you run a command in an interactive shell, it is thrown away. If you're solving a complex problem, it's just a lot easier to do it through an editor with syntax highlighting, useful messages, and the ability to change the first line of a ten-line script.

As for the reason that the shell should be apart from a strong scripting language like Python, have you actually ever tried to use Python as your shell? It is perfectly capable, since it has all of the needed functionality. But it doesn't handle the simple case efficiently, and 99% of the tasks anyone does are simple.

I have to solve complex problems sometimes, and for those I use a suitable tool. But I am constantly doing things to solve simple problems, and any extra keystrokes for the simple case are too many.