Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Guided Tour of the Microsoft Command Shell

Posted by Zonk on from the its-cool-to-have-features dept.

jpkunst writes "Ryan Paul at Ars Technica provides an in-depth, 13 page review of the new Microsoft Command Shell (Monad). (The beta release can be downloaded for free from Microsoft.) From the conclusion: 'Despite my initial skepticism, I am deeply impressed with MSH technology, and I am legitimately excited about the future of the Windows command line.'"

3 of 519 comments (clear)

  1. This is just the beginning by Dekortage · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just a few days ago, there was another article on Slashdot about how Ballmer wants to "storm Linux." If they can convince *nix people that Windows has a powerful CLI, this will do much to suck them in... it is the "eye candy" for true geeks.

    The article author starts to say this himself: My biggest frustration with MSH is the low quality of the actual shell interface. On my Linux system, I am extremely dependent on line editing keyboard shortcuts that simplify manipulation and alteration of command line input. MSH has very few line editing shortcuts, and extremely limited support for tab completion.

    And I remember when CP/M was all the rage... *sigh*

    --
    $nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
  2. doing it for? by sgt+scrub · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I didn't get very far into the article before they got to the "we do things for you" part. Maybe I'm alone in this belief but I absolutely hate it when a language/shell/application will do things for me.
    For instance (from the article):

    MSH features the typical data types found in most other modern languages: strings, integers, arrays, and hash tables. When you enter any of those kinds of values at the command line, MSH will echo them back.
    msh> "blah"
    blah
    msh> 5
    5
    By comparison, in the Bash shell, expressions are always treated as commands and the echo command must be called explicitly if the user wants to display a value at the command line.

    If I want an echo statement I WILL TYPE echo! I don't want the software to ASSUME (make and ass out of me) if I make a typo!

    --
    Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
  3. Re:Quick! Open Source Monkeys Fly by Bobke · · Score: 5, Insightful
    While you are trying to be funny, you are correct,
    unix does need a shell like monad I'm afraid (hence ac)

    What monad will offer is something like

    >ls -l | head -n 10 | sort size | excel

    They are piping objects, we would need to do a lot of parsing to achief the same effect.

    Someone really needs to write a new shell for unix and abstract the unix system, by giving it knowledge of the common unix tools (parsing the output for the user), like ps, ls, sed, etc.

    Want to be famous ?
    Here is your idea.