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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."
Here's a Screenshot:
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\>
A command line. How innovative!
Windows gets more and more like Linix every day. At this rate, I soon won't be able to cut-n-paste between applications! Bring it on. Have they ported xcdplayer yet?
What kind of name is that? Sounds like a command shell that had one testicle removed.
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.
Ok, but does bash or ksh run on windows? This is for their own OS, not unix.
Of course it does, silly.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
... doesn't have a web interface...
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
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.)
Here
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
I didn't write this but I wish I had been there.
e s.html
" I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.
One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?"
source = http://www.flutterby.com/archives/1998_Sep/quicki
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
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.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
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.
- nightcrawler "Reality is an illusion, albeit a ver persistent one..." -A.Einstein
Why do the unix zealots always dismiss...
Because we're Unix zealots dumb ass. Get with the program.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly
.NET class derived from our base class and tag it with a NOUN and VERB. The properties of that class become PARAMETERS.
Actually, in this case it should read...
Those who do not understadn VMS are condemned to reinvent it, poorly
Monad is heavily influenced by VMS, not the UNIX shell.
From an interview w/ the Monad developers.
MSFT Jeffrey Snover (Expert):
Q: I've heard Monad has VMS roots... will we have a utility or functionality similar to VERB to create our own verb commands and parameters?
A: We are very influenced by the VMS (and AS400) environments. That said, we don't have the same set of utilities. Do define you own command, you write a
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.
The fact that the Unix command line has stood the test of time when virtually everything else has been redesigned and redesigned and redesigned is an amazing testament to the thinking which went into it.
They basically got it right.
They must have, otherwise it *would* have been redesigned or have fallen by the wayside decades ago. Decades, in IT. *Decades*. Think about it.
Sure, something may well come along which is "a better way" but I doubt it'll be MS who come up with it, they don't have a philosophy so I don't see how they could.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Yep, that'd do it for me :)
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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.
Actually, I think I have heard/read that since Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier for the NTs), every administration task in Windows was required to be manageable via command line, as well. Something like that, at least - there certainly are a lot of command line apps in
I don't know what exactly makes cmd.exe anemic - it's perfectly fine, in my opinion. It's not as powerful as bash or the other Unix shells, and the scripting is terrible, but it's just fine for basic interactive file management and the execution of command line apps. It does name completion (command.com didn't), which is basically THE killer feature for me.
There is no clear way to interface with the system, such as with kill -SIG PID (granted, this is because Windows is void of a kill binary); the intent behind this is likely the design philosophy of Windows. Ships with every Windows post 2000, I think.
As for other interfaces with the systems, like I said, there is a lot more than what you expect. The NET command certainly is well-known and used for about a thousand things, notable starting and stopping services. It certainly beats the rc.d scripts from my point of view, although I guess that's just because I'm used to it.
That said, one of the first things I do in a fresh Windows install is get Cygwin along with some Unix essentials - grep, wget, etc. And ls for the pretty colors.
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