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."

Comments

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 in metaphysics dating back to the greeks. Monads were central to the philosophy of Liebniz, the co-discoverer of calculus.

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: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