Windows to Have Better CLI

MickyJ writes "The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. 'It will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years', so says Bob Muglia, a Senior VP at Microsoft." More from the Tom's Hardware article: "The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."

Comments

Re:vaporware

[HyperChicken]

It's not "vaporware"; It actually exists. You can get in on the beta for free.

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHWiki - How to sign up

Re:ooooh

[metlin]

The beta has been available for sometime now - apparently you need Win2003 or .Net v2 for it to be installed.

From someone I know who uses it:

• Very slow, but the scripting was sweet, though not as compact as unix
  
• Reminds you of a bastard child of unix+VMS
  
• You can write commands in C#, kinda like servlets where you can extend a base class
  
• It's an OO way of doing things, but unlike Perl/Python which are screenscrapers, Monad scripts can pipe out and pipe in objects - and everything happens through typed vars, not screenscraping.

MSH: QuickRef

[nighty5]

A quick list of functions and examples, looks very Bourne.

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHQuickStart

Its about bloody time.

VBS is a peice of crap, and is way to complicated for what should be simple tasks, MSH looks pretty damn promising.

Re:WTF?

[DaHat]

I'd suggest you take of your Microsoft bashing hat and come out side, Monad has been in public beta for nearly a year now, want to take a look?

1. You will need need a passport account. If you do not have one yet, you can sign-up for one at the beta website listed below.
2. Goto http://beta.microsoft.com/
3. Log into the site using the following guest ID: mshPDC
4. Select Microsoft Command Shell
5. Select Survey in the left column
6. Register with a valid email address.
7. Wait for the information to be sent to you through email. (May take a day or two)
8. Once you receive your confirmation email, log back into http://beta.microsoft.com/ for the content

well..

[bmajik]

i see that some brilliant person modded me as "troll". nice :/

anyway, heres what i thought was cool

- entirely object based. objects are pased via pipeline composition. that means you can do something like

ls | pick name, size | tableout

ls is going to return you a collection of "file" objects. the file object has properties "name" and "size" (and lots of others). the pick command takes each incoming object, and looks for properties called name and size. it then passes down a "new" object that is a bag of the name/size combos (or, it may pass along the original file objects.. i dont remember precisely). finally, tableout is a generic formatter that takes objects and formats them one per row, where each property in the object is displayed in a column.

note that you could replace tableout with say, csvout, or maybe "Excelout"

so the pipe paradigm changes in a way thats pretty cool.

Also, because you're working with .net objects which can be reflected, you get intellisense on the commandline, like working in visual studio. you dont necessarily have to remember properties and what not from object streams - it infers them for you.

(note that a problem i asked them about when i saw the demo - if you have a pipeline where you want tab completion in stage 3, but stage 1 "modifies" state (i.e. in stage 3 you are reporting on what you deleted in stage 1) how do you get the tab complete info without doing the state change in stage one?.. they were aware of this problem and were thinking about it.. but that was years ago :)

finally, what was cool is that across MS people are buying into the idea that a commandline shell that manipulated object representations of data in a generic way was going to be the path forward for adminsterting windows. Consider that the IIS metabase is now xml instead of what it used to be.. and that msh is a shell that works on structured objects... its not coincidental.