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

so, when will we see GNU's version

[Anonymous Coward]

named GONAD ?

MSH?

[KDan]

Ranks right along SHT as a crappy acronym. The first thing I would think of when seeing MSH is MicroSoft Hell, not Microsoft Shell...

Daniel

Re:MSH?

[swordboy]

Its Halloween - lets make a song:

I was working in the lab late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my monster from his slab began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise

He did the MSH
He did the Microsoft MSH
The monster MSH
It was a graveyard SSH
He did the MSH
It caught on in a flash
He did the MSH
He did the Microsoft MSH

hah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take that, dirty Linux hippies! Take that, Thieving Macintosh Republicans!

Seriously, this is a wonderful thing. The shell has been one of the most lacking areas under Windows. I don't know how many times I've dropped into Cygwin or, before that, wasted time writing little C apps just to do basic bulk renaming operations and the likes.

Any word on whether they'll standardize the environment across all Windows products, or is this likely to be a server product only? Will this be the standard shell replacement, or will we now have command.com, cmd.exe and newthing.exe all living in parallel? I like choices, but Windows apps' ad hoc use of largeley-incompatible command.com and cmd.exe is already a source of pain.

Re:hah.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Except of course some moron is now going to dust off a patent on pipe's and sue us all!

Hey, maybe that's why the USPTO's seal looks an awful lot like the elder gods'...

Re:hah.

[drinkypoo]

Pipes come from the original Unix, which is how they made their way into DOS, which was a bad single user knockoff of Unix :P As such they are part of the Unix methodology more than part of the code (though obviously that code is part of what made Unix special when no one else had that kind of redirection) and should not be patentable.

MSH...

[Valar]

I saw MSH and immediatly thought MS Hell, not MS Shell.

Perhaps it should be MSSH?

And I'm not bashing either.

Re:MSH...

[JPelorat]

"And I'm not bashing either. "

da dum tcsh!

3 months...

[heironymouscoward]

...that's the time before we get the first MSH viruses.

Am I being cynical when I think this just looks like VB for Consoles?

Re:Very Nice

[stratjakt]

Anyone who wants to do a bit of scripting on Windows has vbscript, javascript, perl, tcl/tk, and a plethora of other options.

This is going to be for headless servers. So you can ssh into a box and administer it remotely, or through a dumb terminal on a serial port, etc, etc..

There's no good reason your mailserver or each machine in your SQL Server farm needs a GUI.

this has a sister product, you know

[NotAnotherReboot]

Along with MONAD, Microsoft is also developing MENIS, the Microsoft Enhanced Networking Interface Solution. MENIS and MONAD products will be tightly integrated.

Re:this has a sister product, you know

[jsupreston]

And then they will probably redo XENIX to run on the NT Family as MUNT (Microsoft Unix on NT).

Re:this has a sister product, you know

[NoData]

Yeah, yeah, that's right...and MONAD has some interesting development tools...including Structured Application Code (SAC), to hang your scripts off of, and SHell Accessible File Types (SHAFT), that gives you really big, long file names, and a firewall library via the Active Network Usage System (ANUS), that lets you monitor any nasty packets your box might be dumping, and it's all tied together with some really interesting primitves provided by the Basic Integrated Graphical Handle And Input Recognition Yoking Bridge And Link Library System. (BIGHAIRYBALLS). Sounds promising!

Just wait for iShell.

[1337 Apple Zealot]

Apple will surley make something for 10.4, called iSHELL, complete with anti-alaised fonts, tabbed shells, alpha blending, PRESS F9 and see all your shells at once, and of course support for throbbing Aqua buttons.

Re:Just wait for iShell.

[TomorrowPlusX]

I don't mean to be snarky here but you can open several terminal windows and hit f10 to show them all at once. Open the prefs and get throbbing aqua buttons, or turn on antialiasing in "Window Settings..."

If you want tabs, download... [drummroll] iTerm.

This made me laugh ....

[Alranor]

From the comments after the linked article :-

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?

Re:This made me laugh ....

[stratjakt]

You can do WinFS filtering through the "|" symbol. MONAD can also export natively to: HTML, XML, Excel, or plain command text in either a Table or List format.

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. .NET handles whether the user types "-?" or "/?", so you don't have to care anymore!

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.

Re:This made me laugh ....

[nyteroot]

You should read the article, if it actually lives up to everything he's talking about, that shell will in fact be pretty damn cool. Returning objects instead of text is a very neat idea, and I'm rather dreading facing the resident Microsoft Weenie on my hall if he catches wind of this..

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.

Following Free Software

[Gago]

Yet another feature ....
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

[thoolihan]

It's interesting how the story changes. Ballmer would refer to GNU/Linux(especially elements like the use of the shell) as 1980's technology. Now there are making their own.

Maybe users will be able to help themself a little bit...
killall DRM && killall clippy && killall klez
-t

Nothing new except overkill

[Verteiron]

From the article:

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 .NET objects!

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.

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

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.

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?

The names

[Samus]

Whats with these names lately? It seems like MS is dropping u's left and right. First the drop the u out of WinFX and now MSH.

Re:Very Nice

[Kingpin]

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

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

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..)

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.

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..

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.

Monad = Ultimate?

[zetes]

According to this page, it means "ultimate, indivisible unit". Interesting. :)

Z

Perl

[martin]

Most M$ admins I know (and they started out as *nix admins) use perl for their scripting on both O/S's.

Will be interesting to see how the GUI generation get on with a proper scritping language.

MS's CLI preview

[mopslik]

C:\> winword.exe
.___
// \
||@@|
|| ||
|\_||
\__/
_||_

It looks like you're trying to run a program. Would you like me to start WINWORD.EXE? [Y/N]

Re:MS's CLI preview

[SamBeckett]

four words: hill air ee us

Re:MS's CLI preview

[dragonman97]

Absolutely beautiful - it's a good thing my coworkers aren't here to hear me laughing quite this much.

Re:MS's CLI preview

[nmaeone]

It looks like you pressed [o]. Are you a french language user? [y/n][o/n] n
...
In order for the changes you have made to take effect, you must first reboot your computer. Your computer will automatically restart in 5 seconds.
...
It looks like Monad (c)(tm)(iya) is configured for qwerty keyboards. Should I configure it for azerty? [o/n]
...
In order for the changes you have made to take effect, you must first reboot your computer. Your computer will automatically restart in 5 seconds.
...
It looks like the azerty configuration messed up a little a few applications configurations. Should I adjust their configurations? [o/n]
...
In order for the changes you have made to take effect, you must first reboot your computer. Your computer will automatically restart in 5 seconds.
...
It looks like the adjustments break a little the Windows(c)(tm)(iya) Registry? Should I replace it with the saved BackUp Registry? [o/n]
...
In order for the changes you have made to take effect, you must first reboot your computer. Your computer will automatically restart in 5 seconds.
...
It looks like the saved BackUp Registry is now totally screwed up. Should I try to reboot the PC in order to automagically repair everything? [o/n]

Re:Very Nice

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

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

Then we'll finally know that Duke Nukem Forever is about to go gold.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

[Raedwald]

'Monads' are part of Leibnitz's philosophy, which Voltaire famously satirised in Candide 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.

[obfuscated]

It's only a matter of time until some thoughtful person writes enough scripts to make MSH operate like Bash.

Microsoft has come a long way

[Qzukk]

For a long time, the windows command line was a joke. It was basically DOS-in-a-box, capable of running programs, and that was about it. Sure, you had net.exe and a few tools borrowed from the unix world.

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.

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

Better served by a standard *nix shell

[ezavada]

Microsoft is the only major OS that doesn't have a standard *nix style shell. The popularity of cygwin for Windows developers shows that there's significant demand for it. Imagine how much nicer it would be if instead of trying to "leep frog"[sic] the Unix shell they just adopted cygwin.

Re:Better served by a standard *nix shell

[stratjakt]

Good point!

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:Better served by a standard *nix shell

[Zocalo]

You mean like zsh, 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.

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.

Re:The difference:

[AndyS]

What about something like the Java Beanshell?

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:The difference:

[Waffle Iron]

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!

...

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.

Re:The difference:

[EnderWiggnz]

bash is "object'ish" - the thing is that the objects are called "programs", and they have "standard interfaces" called STDIN and STDOUT, etc...

as for a scripting language that is "objectish" - the closest thing isnt perl, its python...

Re:The difference:

[evbergen]

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!

Finally, they're starting to appreciate the unified namespace that unix has been offering since the seventies.

They're only doing it on a way to high level.

Everything should look like a file and be accessible through the same API. read(), write(), ioctl() and select() are all you fundamentally need to do with anything. Inband I/O, out of band I/O, and wait for event. What more could you want to do with any object whatsoever?

The unix model is so beautiful, too bad it isn't taken far enough, even in unix.

Microsoft has an especially long way to go if they're trying to unify all the different system objects on such a high level (the shell).

Re:Maybe they should call back....

[rylin]

SCO still have developers?

Re:Very Nice

[ElectronicElf]

The part that scared me is:

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 .NET objects!

Just what is needed, an easier way to corrupt the registry.

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:so, when will we see GNU's version

[EvilTwinSkippy]

GONAD object network architecture doohicky.

Re:Maybe they should call back....

[EvilTwinSkippy]

...maybe SCO could lend them one or two developers...

I don't think a ritual sacrifice counts as lending.

Re:Very Nice

[Gabey]

There's no good reason your mailserver or each machine in your SQL Server farm needs a GUI.

No kidding...that's why we don't use Windows.

Re:Very Nice

[caluml]

Funny eh. They're moving away from the registry back to services that run with conf files. And they're doing CLI only versions of their OSs for ease of remote configuration. Why not just port all their stuff to some free unix-like OS?

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.

passing objects

[matman]

I have to say that passing objects instead of streams of untyped bytes is neat. They may have screwed up the implementation, but having typed data passing in and out of command line tools would be awesome. Consider how cool it'd be if you had command line tools that spit out things like image, HTML, and music objects, etc. The shell could be smart enough to do smart things with the data; you could do a lot more on the normal command line, especially with a framebuffer. Also, apps could do input validation through type checking.

Re:passing objects

[Wylfing]

The shell could be smart enough to do smart things with the data

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.

Much of this could be done in linux...

[Ars-Fartsica]

...if people would be willing to drop sh/bash etc and adopt a more compelling, orthogonal approach like psh (perl shell) or something entirely new.

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

[Dalroth]

I don't want a Perl shell (at least not until Perl 6 comes out and only if it blows me away). I would LOVE a Python based shell though that let me do pretty much everything I do in bash as easily.

Bryan

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

[archen]

I think most people don't use modern language for the shell, because the shell is mainly meant for people to use. If I want to use a shell, I'll use bash which works quite well for crusing around the system. If I need to script anything complex I'll use Perl, or Ruby (or python or whatever).

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
* /dev/null
* mail (or similar) system to get output when automated

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

[RevAaron]

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.

First- on OS X and Linux, I use psh. I love having a real language as my shell, no need to write little glueish C programs or look up really (more than perl sometimes!) obscure bash syntax. As far as Unix shells go, it's definately top shelf.

But I don't think it could trump MSH- unless we were talking about Perl.NET running psh on Windows or under other OSes using Mono. MSH has some serious strengths- like having access to everything going on in the computer, all of the .NET API- that psh as I use it now does not, putting it in the position to *be* trumped by MSH rather than the other way around. Hell, MSH, with Perl.NET installed, could just as easily use all of that CPAN stuff as you could in vanilla psh.

But, put psh on top of Perl.NET and we've got a really capable setup. Sign me up! Perhaps psh+mono could be the OSS/FS community's answer to MSH on .NET.

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.

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:The Best of All Possible Worlds

[scrytch]

Monads are also a branch of category theory that are adopted by languages like Haskell (the prime developer of which works for Microsoft Research). By obeying a certain set of basic principles, programs structured with monads achieve high degrees of interoperability and consistency, while safely encapsulating data and keeping it from being destroyed by unwanted side effects.

Sure that's an apropos name for a Microsoft product?

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.

Re:Very Nice

[Rogerborg]

> 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:Very Nice

[Zocalo]

What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?

That's a bit of a recurive comment isn't it, what with the glob/regexp "*sh" including "msh" and all? But I suppose it'll go on to pick itself up by its own bootlaces, invent the monopole magnet, debug the rest of Windows and couple of other impossible things before heading off to Milliway's for breakfast.

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:so, when will we see GNU's version

[Lodragandraoidh]

I thought 'NONADS' would be more descriptive.

The more microsoft morphs to become like linux, the less people will be inclined to throw away their money when they can get better functionality for free.

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

[it0]

Well, there is already zoidberg

We owe it to Linux

[nsxdavid]

I'll admit it. I have been a long term supporter of Microsoft products. In particular, I insist on using Windows XP for a lot of things my developers would rather use Linux. Some of this can't be helped, since we produce consumer products for Windows. But on the datacetner side, it's a judgement call.

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 .NET thing is actually built around a core of very good ideas that, when fully realized, make development for Windows quite a different experience than anything else that has come before. This is a logical extension of that.

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. :(

Re:The Best of All Possible Worlds

[shreak]

Voltaire's criticism and satire of Leibniz was centered around "the best of all possible worlds" premise. It had very little, if anything, to do with Libnitz's monads.

Monads were, essentially, philosiphical atoms or molecules, albiet in a very metaphysical sense.

=Shreak

Re:Very Nice

[TedCheshireAcad]

a real, proven scripting language like Python

Sir, I believe you have misspelled 'Perl'.

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

[b17bmbr]

sadly, the opposite will be true. microsoft will sell it to the PHB's as the "best of both worlds" sorta thing. "keep your *nix geeks happy, and get real work done". crap like that. the real questions are can you run the system from the command line without the GUI, doe sthe GUI need to be loaded, can you remotely admin the machine, and will it play nice with others. those are the real questions. and i don't think that is in microsoft's strategy.

Ooooo! What a great ideeeeaaa!

[Ridgelift]

From the article:
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 .NET objects!

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

[schon]

You get rated 'Insightful' for stating what OpenSource zealots hope.

And you get rated 'Insightful' for stating what MS zealots hope.

What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?

Lets be realistic, shall we? First of all, we're talking about what is essentially vaporware - things like "what if it ..." are just as speculative as "it probably won't." Secondly, when has MS ever been able to do something right on their first try?!?! It typically takes them 4 or 5 versions before things begin to acheive what they promised at the outset.

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

Again, more vapour. And (again) what's MS's track record WRT security? I think the phrase "I'll believe it when I see it" sums this up appropriately.

Re:Very Nice

[skandalfo]

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

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...

Re:Very Nice

[ajs]

You get rated 'Insightful' for stating what OpenSource zealots hope.

No, you get rated insightful for noting what MS has done in the past, and extrapolating the future of their next products based on that.

What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?

That would be nice.

Keep in mind that this isn't a contest. MS has some very nice features burried in their software, and that's great. If MS Windows is ever a better platform choice than the free operating systems out there, I say great!

Woefully, it will still not be the platform I use. Why? Because I require the ability to fix bugs, apply patches on my own timetable (sometimes so fast that my vendor doesn't even know about them yet), and generally control my systems behavior.

Windows does not give me that.

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

Security is not a "thing", it's a process. You don't ship your OS in a box with a "NOW WITH 20% MORE SECURITY" sticker and get more security. Longhorn's security will be poor as long as Microsoft continues to deprioritize it in favor of market share. I see no evidence that that has changed since the days of NT4.

Do you think the average developer/manager at MS is dumber than your average OS participant?

No, of course not. The problem is that the average MS employee is working on what a mid-level manager decided he would be working on, based on a company directive from on high that is motivated mostly by marketting. The reason Open Source software tends to be so much more USEFUL, even when it lacks many seemingly obvious features, is the fact that it's created, maintained and refined by those who need it the most. Shells don't seem all that well designed to developers and manageres... and that's because they're not for developers and managers. They're primarily use by sysadmins. A developer spends most of their time in an editor and/or using a rule-based system like make. The shell is just a tool for odd jobs, and many IDEs and feature-laden editors like emacs and vim pretty much suplant the need to use the shell 90% of the time. Sysadmins do not have that luxury.

Look at the MS shell. It is clearly being designed by developers for developers. The ability to manage excel data from the shell is not something that targets the needs of anyone who will have to use this shell routinely. Why is it there? That sort of thing scares me right off the bat, and tells me that this is not a sysadmin tool. Developers under Windows already have very nice tools in their IDEs to script all sorts of interaction with every part of the system that they need. Managers and desktop workers will never want/need a shell.

So ask yourself, which will be more useful: cygwin's bash port to Windows or msh? I can ssh into my Windows box and do admin today, and it requires no msh at all. Why do I need this beast?

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.

No, you don't have to steal anything. First off, let's disabuse ourselves of the notion that anything in a shell is new. Shells have existed for decades that do everything msh is (so far) claiming to do. Most of them died a quick death for lack of use.

Next, the most valuable thing that MS has done in the last few years is to put pressure on other OSes to use features that were long available. For example, MS had a journaling fileysystem. Journaling was not new, it was just kind of hard to get right, and all of the implementations out there were fairly speical purpose or closed source. When MS demonstrated that an end-user OS could indeed benefit from having such a feature, dozens of porojects sprang up to take this long-implemented wheel and re-invent it for open source oses.

This sort of "test environment in the large" is very valuable, and MS has alway

Why not .NET for scripting ?

[master_p]

They should have used the .NET platform for scripting. It would offer numerous advantages:

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 .NET virtual machine.

4) the .NET security model.

5) .NET aware programmers would be able to right scripts without looking for some scripting language manual.

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 .NET already exists; there are numerous web resources.

8) .NET is fully object oriented; scripts can be written as classes placed inside compiled code or run from the shell.

9) less cost since they would have to maintain one less piece of code.

10) long scripts that run frequently could be compiled to .exe for faster execution.

11) as .NET is upgraded, the script capabilities automatically get upgraded.

12) ability to talk to programs through the .NET's advanced COM technology; interoperability with major .NET enabled applications.

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 .NET for scripting. In Linux, scripting languages have evolved to fully programmable libraries...

The new MS Gonad and MS Hell

[ripcrd]

I couldn't even get through the headline without busting a gut. What were those marketers thinking? Are they NUTS?

And the shell, Welcome to MS Hell. I'm already there, baby.

You don't need eyes to see where they are going.

[twitter]

Well, errr, you can't really tell where they are going at all. They have derided scripting with their idiotic GUI bet which they claim is incompatible with scripting. Well it was on their platform because they spagetti coded everything into the GUI. A brief look back shows where they have been with CLI. It also shows that Microsft really can't compete and those who stick with them are in for a bad ride.

Bill Gates, on the launch of XP:

Gates said the release of XP "marked the end of an era, the end of DOS 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.

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:

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

[freality]

I'm all for trying new things in new ways, but it's also good to take stock of old ways. Here's 2 examples that come to mind:

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:Very Nice

[mahdi13]

Joe Sixpack wants smart software to make him look smart

Joe Sixpack is an MCSE

Re:Very Nice

[icedcool]

Because they might have to pay a one time license fee of $699.00.

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

[ncc74656]

I thought UNIX didn't have GONADs...

Re:Very Nice

[turgid]

Why not just port all their stuff to some free unix-like OS?

Because Bill thought that VMS with a GUI would be better, and he doesn't want to lose face now.

Re:Axiom: Everything will be Unix-like

[Haeleth]

> One thing that really irks me about the current CMD is that you can't do complex network operations with it unless you map a new drive letter.
> Now, if Cygwin would tweak Bash to complete the job before MS, I'd be much happier...

Er, it's already there. A transcript from a Cygwin bash session I just ran:

haeleth@Cynewulf ~
$ cd //family/system/WINNT/system32

haeleth@Cynewulf //family/system/WINNT/system32
$ rm -rf *

Okay, so I didn't press enter, but I think the point is made. ;)

think for a moment

[penguin7of9]

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??

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:

find . -type f | xargs grep -il foo

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.

Re:think for a moment

[penguin7of9]

in psh [...] works just fine.

People who propose systems like MSH want to iterate over files and all that good stuff using object oriented scripting features. I'm saying: that turns out not to be very useful in practice. The fact that psh happens to be able to emulate sh behavior is completely besides the point.

It is 'conception' that is basically the problem - you don't know what it is like to use a real scripting language from the command line so its strengths are not apparent.

Sure I do: I have used psh at times, and I have used Smalltalk and Lisp, which are much better at this kind of integration and scripting than even Perl or MSH.

But that kind of design of interactive shells, something that integrates full programming, has always lost out in the real world.

In fact, UNIX has a much better answer: rather than trying to force everything into the same address space, it provides facilities (environment variables, etc.) that let software written in multiple different "little languages" co-exist as if they were all part of a single, unified scripting environment.

If you want to use Perl in a script or pipe, just say "... | perl -e '...' | ...". And if you want to invoke other things from Perl, you can, obviously, use "open", "system", "`...`", and all those other facilities.

The UNIX approach is great; you should give it a try sometimes. MSH and psh, on the other hand, are Microsoft-thinking: obvious, gimmicky, and not all that good in the end.

editor???

[joe_bruin]

so, the critical question is, what is their commandline text editor? i can't imagine them including anything useful. and if they do include it, it's bound to be hidden (like ms's findstr, aka grep)
let's imagine a typical user session:

Microsoft Windows XP Advanced Server Pro Champion Edition [Version 5.2.3915]
(C) Copyright 1985-2006 Microsoft Corp.

M$ vi test.txt
'vi' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

M$ emacs test.txt
'emacs' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

M$ pico test.txt
'pico' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

M$ joe test.txt
'joe' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

M$ xemacs test.txt
'xemacs' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

M$ ex test.txt
'ex' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

M$ edlin test.txt
New file
*quit
Abort edit (Y/N)? y

M$ notepad test.txt

They're missing the point

[taradfong]

The magic of Unix's CLI lies in having lots of small, useful tools that play well together by talking text. It's brilliant and has a 3 decade track record.

Instead, Microsoft wants to have a massive Borg-like internal heap of objects and functions, and give you a text interface to it.

I'd much rather have lots of little, self-sufficient programs that essentially *are* the OS, rather than a new view into the OS.

Yes, having function-level access and object manipulation sounds really cool and orderly compared to the barbaric pipe & grep. But when all goes to h3ll, you'll wish you had text.

Text is universal. Objects and function calls change like the wind.

People in glass houses...

[fmaxwell]

I thought 'NONADS' would be more descriptive.

People using a "Unix" derivative OS probably should not yuck it up about naming something "NONADS".

Microsoft confusion machine again

[Alex Belits]

So basically Microsoft, in their fine tradition of creating an confusion in terms, made a "shell" that can't run programs but instead runs "managed code" (aka shared libraries in dotnet environment) and maintains all objects inside itself, but has a syntax that is confusingly similar to Unix shell pipes. The concept is obviously flawed -- Unix shell uses Unix-specific unified file descriptor model, that Windows lacks, so while in Unix shell is often used to process easily-parseable text using pipelines of programs (some remote) and any overcomplication of data passed between programs is frowned upon, in Windows the most convoluted ever format is being used to exchange things between "programs" that are sitting in the belly of that "shell". They could just as well make the whole interface an UML editor.

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.