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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."
named GONAD ?
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
Carpe Diem
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.
I saw MSH and immediatly thought MS Hell, not MS Shell.
Perhaps it should be MSSH?
And I'm not bashing either.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
...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?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Along with MONAD, Microsoft is also developing MENIS, the Microsoft Enhanced Networking Interface Solution. MENIS and MONAD products will be tightly integrated.
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
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
From the article:
.NET objects!
.NET objects? This seems rather like using a baseball bat to swat a fly...
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.
And as for returning search results as
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
C:\> winword.exe
.___
// \
||@@|
|| ||
|\_||
\__/
_||_
It looks like you're trying to run a program. Would you like me to start WINWORD.EXE? [Y/N]
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.
.NET handles whether the user types "-?" or "/?", so you don't have to care anymore!
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"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.
'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.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
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.
I don't think a ritual sacrifice counts as lending.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
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?
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
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.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
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
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.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
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
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.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Joe Sixpack wants smart software to make him look smart
Joe Sixpack is an MCSE
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Because they might have to pay a one time license fee of $699.00.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
I thought UNIX didn't have GONADs...
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Because Bill thought that VMS with a GUI would be better, and he doesn't want to lose face now.
Stick Men
> 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:Okay, so I didn't press enter, but I think the point is made.
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.
let's imagine a typical user session: