Microsoft's new CLI 688
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."
3 months... (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I being cynical when I think this just looks like VB for Consoles?
This made me laugh .... (Score:2, Interesting)
Finally a real Next Gen command shell... And one that looks to put the others to shame.
Nice leep frog MS...
Can anyone who knows more about these things than I explain exactly how this puts the various Unix shells to shame?
Following Free Software (Score:2, Interesting)
The only thing that I would find revelant is that MS is definitly thinking in terms of "they have neat shells in Linux, how can we have something that stands the comparison ?". After Apple including KHTML and GNU parts in its operating system, it seems that Free Software are really getting the lead in software industry.
so much for old technology (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe users will be able to help themself a little bit...
killall DRM && killall clippy && killall klez
-t
Nothing new except overkill (Score:5, Interesting)
One last thing: anything can be mapped to a drive, and drives don't just have to be letters. (Ok, I lied - that was 2) The example I was shown was that the registry was mapped to a drive, and you could navigate it like any other drive, with the results being returned from the commandlet as
The user has been able to map a filesystem to a folder rather than a drive letter since at least Windows 2000, and I think it was possible even under NT4. Nothing new there.
The registry (along with many other things) can be mapped as part of the filesystem fairly easily, as demonstrated by this 264kB DLL file [regxplor.com].
And as for returning search results as
Perl (Score:3, Interesting)
Will be interesting to see how the GUI generation get on with a proper scritping language.
Re:This made me laugh .... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure beats the hell out of using obscure grep commands to parse a blob of ascii.
And....the commandlets are developer friendly. You can make a commandlet by inheriting from the commandlet base class, and adding attribute tags to the public properties to make them parameters to the commandlet.
Sounds pretty easy for a developer to extend.
This is a good thing for MS to do. The slashbots are always whining about how MS takes standards and breaks them for it's own gain. Rather than taint your precious bash or perl, they started from scratch.
MONAD (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.abercrombiegroup.co.uk/~noel/research/m onads.html
Is already a mathematical term
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Monad.html
and who knows what else, surprised MS didn't choose another word they could Copyright, and TradeMark
The Best of All Possible Worlds (Score:5, Interesting)
'Monads' are part of Leibnitz's philosophy [www.ucd.ie], which Voltaire [lucidcafe.com] famously satirised in Candide [literature.org] with the figure of Dr. Pangloss, who resolutely maintained that we live in 'this, the best of all possible worlds' despite a succession of disasters that would convince any sane man that he was wrong.
How very suitable for a Microsoft product.
Only a matter of time. (Score:2, Interesting)
What about bash under Cygwin? (Score:1, Interesting)
Why not simply use bash under Cygwin to get all the functionality of a decent shell?
Who need's another shell?
Or maybe MS could natively support unix bash under Windows.
Microsoft has come a long way (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently, Microsoft has actually begun to produce command line tools for system operations, controlling your services, networks, policies, and registry from the command prompt. But they still have a long way to go, these features are poorly documented (the policy editor's help lists a subset of all the policies you can edit with it. The KB article on it basically is a copy-paste of the help message, with explanations of the policynames provided), typically cryptic, and still don't provide the full set of features.
They may have come a long way, but they have a long way to go. And remember, this is just playing catchup.
Better served by a standard *nix shell (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Very Nice (Score:2, Interesting)
The example I was shown was that the registry was mapped to a drive, and you could navigate it like any other drive, with the results being returned from the commandlet as
Just what is needed, an easier way to corrupt the registry.
Much of this could be done in linux... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why more people don't actively pursue a modern language for the shell interface. sh script syntax is tortorous. So much easier and maintainable to write perl scripts. So why not use perl from the command line??
psh never really seemed to take off but it let you basically enter a perl debugging session but execute shell commands also. This would basically trump anything msh could muster and also provide the entire universe of CPAN to the shell.
sh is right up there with Makefiles for unix utilities that basically suck but are too entrenched to replace.
Re:The Best of All Possible Worlds (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure that's an apropos name for a Microsoft product?
Re:The difference: (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never used it, but I understood it was meant to be a Java interpreter which could be used like this.
If you wrote a nice series of base classes then you could probably duplicate this functionality I would have thought
Re:Very Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
> just as they're "stealing" "our" ideas that WORK.
Open Source ideas like bash-a-like shells?
If you can name three original ideas that were generated by an open source / free software project rather than being appropriated from Unix, Windows, or MacOS, I'll eat my hat without salt.
Re:The difference: (Score:2, Interesting)
...
I think people don't give MS enough credit for where they stand even today, frankly.
Way ahead of them there. Five years ago when I got sick of the insanely overengineered registry API, I wrote my own C++ wrapper that did essentially the same thing. I'm sure thousands of others have done this as well. Glad to see that they're catching up with the rest of us.
The thing that I can't fathom is WTF didn't they make the registry look like a file system in the first place? Now when they finally get around to doing it, people think that it's some kind of rocket science. It only seems high tech because the original API was so unuseable.
Two problems (Score:1, Interesting)
1) The Longhorn Command Shell does not yet support console applications. In other words, launching a console
2) The CLI has no acceptable means of text editing within the CLI itself. So, no VI, Emacs, or even EDIT.EXE. Editing must be done via external editor.
Re:Just wait for iShell. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want tabs, download... [drummroll] iTerm.
We owe it to Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
But don't get me wrong, our big money maker stuff runs on Linux. And always will, I imagine. The power of Linux on the server side is so clear. And the new Kernel, when it's ready, looks like it'll solve the last of the bottleneck issues we've suffered under for so long.
I've adopted the idea that you pick the right tool for the right job. And I've always felt that Linux was awful at being approachable without being a dedicated Linux hacker (in the early days). Then as time went by it becamse more and more accessable. Heck, we even have Lindows now.
What Microsoft didn't expect is that this would ever really happen. But with Linux becoming more and more friendly, it's inherent power is undeinable.
So they are reacting. This new command line is simply a way of building up the server potential of... well... their servers. The whole
The fact is, competition works. Linux is driving Microsoft to actually innovate again! And I imagine that if Windows has a command line that Linux users will be envious of, they will respond in kind.
Patents, of course, will still be the horrible sticky point in all this.
Ooooo! What a great ideeeeaaa! (Score:3, Interesting)
One last thing: anything can be mapped to a drive, and drives don't just have to be letters. (Ok, I lied - that was 2) The example I was shown was that the registry was mapped to a drive, and you could navigate it like any other drive, with the results being returned from the commandlet as
From ESR's "Art of Unix Programming"
Quote #1
Unix has a couple of unifying ideas or metaphors that shape its APIs and the development style that proceeds from them. The most important of these are probably the "everything is a file" model and the pipe metaphor[20] built on top of it.
Quote #2
NT has grown by accretion, and lacks a unifying metaphor corresponding to Unix's "everything is a file" or the MacOS desktop
Oooo! So does this mean Windows is finally going to have a unifying idea, something like "everything is almost like a file"?
Re:Very Nice (Score:2, Interesting)
Before the Internet appeared and before personal computers were so cheap, UNIX ran on big machines that a lot of people had to share. Since its origin it was a multiuser environment where many users could work and "live" at the same time. It was like lots of people living in a small city.
So it had to provide means to reduce to the minumum the probability for a bad user to enslave others or to take an unfair amount of resources that would leave the others without thir fair share. Thus UNIX has file and execute permissions, quota support, superuser account, and other restrictions buit in since the beginning.
The provided mechanisms may not be perfect, but they have been refined during 20 years (as Microsoft says, GNU/Linux is 80's technolohy; but someone invented the wheel even before that and we keep using it shamelessly) and their usage has got embedded into UNIX users' culture.
GNU/Linux inherits these UNIX security traditions.
By contrast, Microsoft operating systems started to get popular when cheap personal computers became available. Before the Internet boom, when these computers remained unconnected, only the ligitimate user would touch the machines, and so the operating systems could be single-user (even single-process, remember) entities that didn't have to care about security.
Now that with the Internet everything begins to be interconnected, you find that the user no longer operates in his/her own computer only. Now he/she has to live in the big big city formed by all the Internet-connected computers.
Microsoft added connectivity to their single-user OS's, but not the mechanisms to avoid bad-behaved Internet citizens from harming the legitimate user. They're trying to catch up. They added users and groups to Windows NT and have recently incorporated firewalls and things alike into their OSs.
But this is not a technical issue only. The Microsoft user and developer culture has still to catch up, and it can be a long time until it does, moreover when Microsoft is scaring people from upgrading to better versions with their insane prices.
As an example of the lack of security culture, take the example of Administrators, Advanced Users and Normal Users in Windows XP. It's supposed that Advanced Users could install programs, but I know of several cases in which the programs would refuse to install (or even run) if not using an Administrator account.
I think that it will take more than Longhorn's scheduled time to change users' and developers' minds...
Why not .NET for scripting ? (Score:3, Interesting)
1) full programmability from the shell; the script programmer can use linked lists, for example, if she wishes.
2) access to GUI functionality; some times it is desirable
3) an already existing interpreter that can do optimizations on the fly: the
4) the
5)
6) network adminstrators could transfer their scripting skills to development; I know plenty of guys that want to jump from administration to development.
7) documentation for
8)
9) less cost since they would have to maintain one less piece of code.
10) long scripts that run frequently could be compiled to
11) as
12) ability to talk to programs through the
13) direct use of XML and databases from the script.
14) easy networking, using sockets with one line of code.
To my mind, a script is just like a console application, although in source format and not in binary. There is no conceptual difference: a script is a program that someone writes that is not compiled; it runs interpreted. It would be a waste of resources to use anything other than
You don't need eyes to see where they are going. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill Gates, on the launch of XP [wired.com]:
Gates said the release of XP "marked the end of an era, the end of DOS [trexion.com] and also the end of Windows 95." ... Gates informing the crowd that he agreed with Apple's Jobs that Windows 3.1 was a "crummy operating system," and assuring the crowd that he'd soon say that about Windows 95.
Of course, we remember they used the phrase "end of dos" for the launch of windows 95. Funny how they are now saying the same things about XP they said about 3.1, 95, 98 and ME. That's consistency!
Now, do they have consistancy in shells? They have derided their primary shell, DOS. But what of their other scripting efforts? Remember their "Unix Killer" "New Technology (NT)" and their ksh? Korn does!
I knew that Microsoft had licensed a number of tools from MKS so I came to the microphone to tell the speaker that this was not the "real" Korn Shell and that MKS was not even compatible with ksh88. I had no intention of embarrassing him and thought that he would explain the compromises that Microsoft had to make in choosing MKS Korn Shell. Instead, he insisted that I was wrong and that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn Shell. [slashdot.org]
Ah yes, so portable it was. While NT is dead, csh and ksh trive themselves and in their free counterparts. No new training is required for bash or pdksh.
For an instant, Bill liked Java [microsoft.com]:
Java is our latest programming tool, and we've got a Java compiler with the highest benchmark feeds, great debugging. Java's -as you know, is a wonderful language, and everybody should have that in their portfolio. (1996)
He tried to make the crowd laugh at Sun in the same speach because he wanted to kill Unix with NT. Where is M$ "java" today?
C# .NET and all look to me like a combination of all the second rate junk they've thrown together in their attempt to emulate and eradicate first rate competitors. "Linux is a Cancer", they say, use our shared source instead. Yeah right.
Oh wait, I see the patterns. EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish followed by "that sucks, buy the new one." You have to be blind to miss it. If you follow the M$ way, you will be constantly sucked for money and time learning their new tweaks.
It's only going to get worse because free software is impossible for them to eat up or beat. Their efforts to stick to their previous marketing plans are wrecked by actually having to compete on merrits and price. This is making them less and less stable. The closed source model can not compete with the free software development model.
In case you don't know, UNIX CLIs are cool too (Score:3, Interesting)
1) I've recently talked to a friend about a problem he was trying to solve. He's on OSX and perl hacker. He wanted a utility to find all the duplicate files on his machine, and was considering writing it in perl or maybe java. We talked about it a bit, and I said I'd approach it by writing the shell script first as a prototype. I wrote it into our IM conversation off the top of my head:
find / -type f -exec md5sum \{\} \; | gawk '{print $2" "$1}' | sort -k 2 | uniq -D -f 1
We looked around and found lots of programs on OSX to do this.. some even for $. But I don't think he even went ahead with coding it... this was good enough.
2) Once I talked to Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, about their choice of OS/tools (Linux/ext2 and GNU, respectively). Mr. Kahle said GNU tools in bash were the only technology they had found that could process the data at the IA, i.e 300TB+ rolling snapshot of the internet. They'd found some problems in sort I think, but sumitted patches.
So sure, you can do this all again, but somebody is going to have to find that bug in MSH's sort, and they probably won't be able to submit a patch because MS is a proprietary shop.
The UNIX shell is a great inheritance. It's cryptic when you first get into it, but basically, it's that way for terseness.. you can find out how to do almost anything by reading the f'ing manual, or searching the web.
Re:Much of this could be done in linux... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bryan
Re:passing objects (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, that's the part where MS always falls down, isn't it? Their "smart" choices about what to do with a bit of data are always quite wrong, but they will not be able to resist the urge to make 'grep -n' return Excel data and auto-launch Excel to display the results.
Re:Much of this could be done in linux... (Score:2, Interesting)
In any event I think Microsoft will miss the power of scripting because of their mentality. Unix is a collection of small applications glued together by the shell. Microsoft will probably make a huge programming language that is accessable right from the command line. Then we can await lots of fun problems like what version we have and backwords compatibility nightmare. These are the sorts of problems we have with _programming_languages_ , we don't need them on the shell too! Unix is very fine tuned area as far as the CLI goes, and MS will either learn from it, or re-implement it badly. How is this all going to work with their new signed code junk anyway? I mean if anyone can slap together a shell script virus, it would seem that all the DRM protection went down the toilet.
Other things MS will probably need to re-invent:
* man pages
*
* mail (or similar) system to get output when automated
think for a moment (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, you don't know. But think for a moment: people have had Perl-like languages since the 1960's. Do you really think you or Microsoft are the first to think that using an object-oriented scripting language is a good idea?
The reason why people use sh syntax is because it is enormously effective. Try expressing something like:in Perl or some other scripting language.
Of course, many people who complain about sh syntax really just don't know how to use it.
For interactive use by skilled users and many scripting tasks, bash/ksh is unbeatable. And for the kinds of scripts where Perl makes sense--you can simply use Perl.
This would basically trump anything msh could muster and also provide the entire universe of CPAN to the shell.
Yes, psh is a better version of what msh is trying to achieve. But, you know, even that's nowhere near good enough to dethrone bash/ksh.
Microsoft confusion machine again (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, it can prevent some people who learned that shit from switching to Unix -- they will until the end of their miserable lives associate pipelines with shitloads of DLLs instead of streams of text.