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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."
It is , I beleive, the fist object oriented shell.
All the others use strings for piping.
Most *nix users i've seen writing online that tried it for a good while to really get used to it thoguht it was really good.
All of these little "tools", Microsoft is providing. Take a look at the samples for MSH and you will that the commands are heavily inspired by Unix.
.Net objects into mini applications with the full .NET framework available for use will be increadably useful.
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This tools are "commandlets." Being able to pipe
I can see MSH being a HUGE improvment over Bash. For example:
MSH> get-process
(IMAGINE A PROCESS LIST HERE, OR SEE THE LINK... damn
Want to filter that by virtual memory consuption?
MSH> get-process | where { $_.virtualmemorysize -gt 150000000}
(IMAGINE A PROCESS LIST HERE, OR SEE THE LINK... damn
In Unix, you have to parse string output and all sorts of bullshit in order to access a data field of some conceptual object, but with MSH I will be able to simply access it directly in a type-safe way. That is a huge improvement.
See more here: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/02.html
http://brandonbloom.name
" And all of that will require processing power. All of those objects have to be converted each and every time they get passed. Even the conversion to text will take cycles."
Are you kidding? Parsing text is one of the hardest things for a modern processor to do. Having fields available in a consistent internal representation allows you to do stuff based on them without having to parse anything, and you don't have to parse things. How many regexen do you write in a typical shell script? I'm not saying there are no disadvantages to Microsoft's way, but speed isn't one of them.
Also, you don't have to launch so many processes with MSH way. *nix shells can be prohibitively slow if you use an iteration strategy that results in lots of processes being launched, but sometimes it's hard to set things up as a pipe because you often have to do more complex parsing.
These things aren't so much of a disadvantage for larger programs that often end up in another language, but small one-time scripts will probably be easier.
I'm not going to use Windows, but if someone can come up with something better than that stupid Python shell replacement on UNIX I'll give it a shot.
Actually it seems to me that new tools for the current shells could serialize objects and pass them through the pipes we have.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
It's rather sad to see people dismissing this so quickly. I can guarantee if this was an Objective-C based shell from Apple people would be slobbering all over it by now, and saying how innovative Apple were, probably with some jabs at Linux too. I remember seeing an initial presentation about MSH a while back and the thinking behind it impressed me then, I'll be keen to try this when it's fully released.
Very cool shell; if you don't know anything about it, don't assume it's just a bash or ksh clone.. it's actually something fairly unique.