Next-gen Windows Command Line Shell Now in Beta

Suddenly_Dead writes "Microsoft's new command line shell, MSH or Monad, has entered the beta phase. Channel9 Wiki has information on how to download this (complete with Guest ID), and other related info."

Comments

First impressions

[Alioth]

I've had it since yesterday.

My first impression - well, it will be fine for scripting, but as it stands it's appaling as an interactive shell - possibly slightly worse than cmd.exe as an interactive shell, and falling far short of bash/tcsh et al. The defaults for the commands seem way too verbose. If you're just passing objects around in a script that's fine - but for interactive use, it's just awful.

Re:First impressions

[Des Herriott]

"get-process" is far more intuitive than "ps"

No, it is not. Neither is intuitive - a complete newcomer would have no chance of guessing either command. Both must be learned. Given that, I'll take the 2-character command over the 11-character command any day.

Re:First impressions

[slavemowgli]

That, frankly, is rubbish. Someone who doesn't know about the commands and what they do will have to learn their names anyway; it doesn't matter, for example, whether you have to remember "get-process" or "ps". In fact, it might be easier to remember "ps", as it is shorter and more concise.

As for the suggestion to alias commands so you don't have to type as much - wow, that's even more braindead. Part of the appeal of Unix is that the commands are pretty much the same everywhere - I can use grep to grep for things, for example, and expect it to work more or less the same on every platform. What you're advocating is the creation of an entirely individual set of commands, so administrators will either have to keep both sets of commands in mind (even more of a hassle), or be unable to (easily) understand each other because one abbreviated "get-process" as "gp", one used "ps" instead, and so on.

whoosh!

[lheal]

That was the sound of the point, flying past Microsoft's Collective brain.

The Unix shell is the implementation of the Unix philosophy of small parts working together. It's the antithsesis of Windows' philosophy of providing everything possible through DLLs distributed with the OS.

For a shell to be useful, you need lots of little tools. Otherwise you're just trying to provide an isomorphism to the GUI, with command line switches and arguments taking the place of check boxes.

On the other hand, I suppose it's better than nothing.

Re:whoosh!

[Eudial]

$ ps vOr

List processses, order by memory consumption, saving 52 keypresses.

If you absolutely -must- sort out those that have less than n mem usage, try
$ ps vOr | awk '{if ($8 > 15000) print $_ }'

Still 15 less characters than your example...

Re: No Thanks

[lazy_arabica]

Why do the unix zealots always dismiss ANY attempt to make the user experience more high-level / semantic-oriented (especially if it comes from Microsoft) ? I am a Unix-user, but I'm also very interested in MSH, some of its features sound really innovative and powerful. I'll probably stick with bash too though, until Unix becomes deprecated (because I don't think it will ever evolve, since so many people, like you, think the perfection has been invented 30 years ago.)

Re: No Thanks

[grasshoppa]

Yes, cygwin makes common Unix shells available on windows, but it's just a CLI. It doesn't interact with the rest of windows, the registry, other user space apps, etc. It's basically just a way to interact with your file system... Monad is a big step ahead for windows...

Talk about proving the quote right.

That's all bash is. That's all it does in linux too. You use other programs to do the work, bash is simply an interface to the file system. And a damn elegant one at that.

Re:That's all well and good

[CaroKann]

A windows shell, without the various limitations of the DOS shell, would be very useful in more ways than I can count. For example, DOS .bat files are still used a lot, especially in cases where you want to run an application, like a Java based program, with it's own system environment setup.

Lots of people are "bashing" this up agianst various Unix shells, but what does it matter? Windows needs something like this, period.

Re: No Thanks

[SilverspurG]

To me, Monad is an exciting effort to try to reinvent the command line.

The biggest hurdle for the Monad shell is that Microsoft has painted themselves into a corner. The vast majority of software running on a Windows platform was not written with command line operability or scripting in mind.

The Monad shell may be nice. Heck, it may turn out to be superior to any *nix *sh shell. When it comes right down to it, though, the Windows developers are not going to begin rewriting all of their software just to make it command line compliant.

Monad is doomed, not by Monad, but by Windows.

Ok, ok... fun's over--seriously now...

[nightcrawler.36]

When I first read this, I too thought MS was just retooling some form of CMD to compete with the new-found craze in command lines. But then I read about it on Wikipedia.org. It's considerably more than most of you are thinking. I'm not going to point out what it does here, go read about it(if you don't know what it is.). But how much of this is Microsoft bashing and how much of this is a legitimate analysis of the quality of computer user tools? I think we're seeing a world where things are starting to settle in to what they should be. Windows are going to be desktop machines, *nix are going to run servers(not IIS) and Macs will continue to win the hearts and minds of artists, universities and affluent kids. MS is not reinventing UNIX. They're simply providing *NIX-like tool for "Windows" developers'. It's called competition and it's good for us. It gives me yet another option to choose from. Welcome it! you don't have to use it if you don't like it.

what can UNIX learn from this?

[ArbitraryConstant]

I don't think many of us care that the command names are a little hard to remember. I have just as much trouble remembering stuff from APIs with nice names like Java.

No, this highlights a weakness in UNIX shells: we have to parse things. It's slow and it's a huge pain. It seriously limits what we can do. grep, sed etc can be used to manipulate streams but nobody ever implements the complete grammar of the input they can get. They implement some subset that's good enough for the job at hand and tweak it when it screws up. It's worked well for decades, but that doesn't mean we can't do better.

Having a data structure passed along a pipe like MSH does is a huge advantage and very efficient, but I think most UNIX people can agree that it's not worth it to bring everything into the same process. What's an alternative? Serialize the data structure (in some human readable form to stay true to UNIX tradition) and pass that down the pipe, from one process to another. That would work with the pipes we have now and the shells we have now, we just need new tools and a serialization protocol.

Re: No Thanks

[NickFortune]

Well, it might have something to do with the Windows zealots have sneered at all things *nix for years on end. That does tend to bring about a certain amount of crowing when Redmond, years after trumphantly declaring a technology obsolete, copies it amidst much fanfare and proclaims it to be the Way Forward.

Yep, that'd do it for me :)