Rumors of Cmd's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (microsoft.com)

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Rumors of Cmd's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (microsoft.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday January 5, 2017 @04:45AM from the stating-it-out dept.

Senior Program Manager at Microsoft has responded to speculations that Command Prompt is going away. He writes: The Cmd shell remains an essential part of Windows, and is used daily by millions of businesses, developers, and IT Pro's around the world. In fact:
1. Much of the automated system that builds and tests Windows itself is a collection of many Cmd scripts that have been created over many years, without which we couldn't build Windows itself!
2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
3. Many of our customers and partners are totally dependent on Cmd, and all its quirks, for their companies" existence!
In short: Cmd is an absolutely vital feature of Windows and, until there's almost nobody running Cmd scripts or tools, Cmd will remain within Windows.

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Good! by DogDude · 2017-01-05 04:50 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'm glad! CMD is critical in our company, too.

MS actually does a really good job supporting things for a long time. Some other responses, I'd imagine...

Apple: We're brave enough to stop supporting any version of CMD that came out before this year.

Google: We killed it. Too bad.If you don't buy our ads, then we don't really care about how you use our software.

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1. Re:Good! by __aaclcg7560 · 2017-01-05 05:31 · Score: 2
  
  Microsoft didn't create Powershell. Powershell was written by an independent developer who was then bought out by Microsoft.
  Hence, Microsoft pays for new lines of code.
2. Re:Good! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-01-05 06:04 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Apple : You can still use CMD, you just have to dongle-chain 3+ apps to get it to work. Oh yeah, and that'll be $500. You're welcome.
  Google : We've decided arbitrarily to change CMD to DMC, but we'll probably switch it back and forth 2 or 3 times in the coming week. Business dependencies? What are they?
  Amazon : CMD will be replaced by a flying mothership powered by cosmic rays. (*Bong sounds)
  HP : We've decided to sell off CMD and focus on shit people no longer need or want instead.
  IBM : Spending 200 million on our own cutting-edge CMD app was probably not a good idea, but hell, it's just money right? We're IBM, it's fine.
  Adobe : In order to use CMD, you simply have to sign up for our $200 a month subscription service to everything else we sell. What a deal!
  Facebook : Anything you type into a CMD prompt is FB property and will be tattooed on your soul forever. #Progress. 'Zuck '2042
  WSJ : We will no longer call CMD line input "commands", we'll just fill your screen with DOS and let the reader decide what it is.
  Trump : I love CMD, it's the best for hacking. Very strong commands! Why is Bash so weak and girly?
3. Re:Good! by deadwill69 · 2017-01-05 06:35 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Seems someone forgot to do their homework:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
  Paradigm Multi-paradigm: Imperative, pipeline, object-oriented, functional and reflective
  Designed by Jeffrey Snover, Bruce Payette, James Truher (et al.)
  Developer Microsoft
4. Re:Good! by DickBreath · 2017-01-05 06:46 · Score: 2
  
  I hope they don't get rid of Edlin which is critical to our operations here.
  
  As for Microsoft doing a really good job of supporting things for a long time, I wonder how much 16 bit code is still in Windows 10?
  
  --
  
  I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
5. Re:Good! by mdm-adph · 2017-01-05 07:05 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  How easy would that be, though? The way cmd and powershell works is fundamentally different: cmd is string-based, like bash, but powershell is object-based. Powershell really is a different animal entirely once you start using it.
  
  --
  It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
6. Re:Good! by MightyMartian · 2017-01-05 07:20 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Maybe they could make it so Powershell doesn't take 15-30 seconds to actually become useful.
  
  --
  The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
7. Re:Good! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-01-05 07:35 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Oracle: Now that you're using CMD, we're going to shake you down for licensing fees or sue you.
  Congress: CMD is flawed so we should dismantle it without a good alternative in place. With fewer regulations and more tax cuts, the market will create a better CMD.
  Samsung: *KABOOM*
  Liberals: Trump loves CMD, so it's probably sexist or racist.
  Conservatives: Liberals hate CMD so we love CMD.
  YouTube: Please watch this advertisement before continuing to use CMD.
  Wikipedia: !!!PLEASE GIVE US MONEY!!! "Command Prompt" redirects here. For the concept, see command prompt.
8. Re:Good! by ArtemaOne · 2017-01-05 12:11 · Score: 2
  
  Get more RAM and a SSD. Maybe a Kirby Lake UPC!
9. Re:Good! by rtb61 · 2017-01-05 12:30 · Score: 2
  
  Likely M$ are pushing the retail version of Windows to be a closed box the user can not touch. Basically looking to turn the consumer PC into a XBox complete with software and content licence fees, that sells all your privacy and that you have pretty much no control over.
  
  --
  Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
WTF? by Major+Blud · 2017-01-05 04:50 · Score: 4, Informative

1) Who suggested that it dead?
2) Oh wait, there's no link to an article to state who it said it.
I mean really.....

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1. Re:WTF? by freeze128 · 2017-01-05 04:54 · Score: 2
  
  Probably because Microsoft themselves said that they would replace CMD with powershell in newer Windows 10 builds.
  
  https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/11/18/1446216/microsoft-replaces-command-prompt-with-powershell-in-latest-windows-10-build
2. Re:WTF? by hawguy · 2017-01-05 04:57 · Score: 2
  
  1) Who suggested that it dead?
  2) Oh wait, there's no link to an article to state who it said it.
  I mean really.....
  Welcome to the internet! Since you are apparently new to the internet and don't know how it works, I'll point out that that funny colored text you see in the article summary is a link to the article.
  Click on it and you'll be taken to the article where you'll find the link you're seeking:
  
  This post is in response to a story published on December 6th 2016 by ComputerWorld titled “Say goodbye to the MS-DOS command prompt” and its follow-up article “Follow-up: MS-DOS lives on after all“.
3. Re:WTF? by Major+Blud · 2017-01-05 05:19 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  When it was originally posted, there was no link. I'm not the only person here to state so.
  
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  If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
4. Re:WTF? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-01-05 05:31 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
  How do they know that? Polls have been made? Oh, wait. Telemetry.
This is why Microsoft is going down! by 31415926535897 · 2017-01-05 04:53 · Score: 4, Funny

C'mon guys, have COURAGE!
Proof that they're spying on you by erapert · 2017-01-05 04:53 · Score: 4, Insightful

2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
The only way they could know that is if they're spying on everyone who uses Windows.
Am I wrong? Is there some other, totally consensual and benign way that they could know this?
1. Re:Proof that they're spying on you by WaffleMonster · 2017-01-05 08:49 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  No one every denied that there's proof. Most people just agree that it's entirely benign and used for statistic gathering.
  Please don't use "spying" in this context, you're diluting the meaning of the word to suit your personal agenda.
  I completely agree. The word "stalking" is much more apt than "spying".
2. Re:Proof that they're spying on you by Marxist+Hacker+42 · 2017-01-05 09:26 · Score: 2
  
  RTFA, they clearly state that they have open stats for just about every app that runs in Windows. And that the statistics indicate CMD is equivalent in importance to Edge.
  
  --
  SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
3. Re:Proof that they're spying on you by erapert · 2017-01-05 09:40 · Score: 2
  
  What word would you like me to use?
  
  If your mother were looking through your computer and counting how many and what kinds of files you open, which programs and how often, what kind of hardware etc. ... you would call that "spying" wouldn't you? Would "snooping" be a better word?
  
  Whatever word you choose, it's an invasion of privacy.
  I'm not the only one who values his privacy so this is not a personal agenda; it's one I share with a great many people.
Need more coffee by FunkSoulBrother · 2017-01-05 04:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

Did anyone else read that as CmdrTaco has died, or at least as a hoax of his death?
Edge..What Edge? by bogaboga · 2017-01-05 05:05 · Score: 2

Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!

I wonder why they included Edge. I have never seen anyone use it. Is it that popular? I don't think so and the numbers show.
Re:telemetry by arth1 · 2017-01-05 05:08 · Score: 2

Possibilities:
1. Microsoft is citing false numbers
2. Microsoft is pulling the info via telemetry
3. Microsoft is using numbers based on Anti-Virus vendors' stats on malware infections :-)
2b: Microsoft is using cmd to collect the telemetry...
Re:Thank God by Maritz · 2017-01-05 05:10 · Score: 2

I hope you uploaded that comment with hand-crafted packets or else you're a HYPOCRITE!

--
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Now buy the t-shirt... by Richard+Kirk · 2017-01-05 05:28 · Score: 2

http://shirtoid.com/164835/aut...
Re:as expected by alex67500 · 2017-01-05 05:34 · Score: 5, Funny

When I read the title I first thought it was about CmdrTaco...
Re:Riiiiight by EndlessNameless · 2017-01-05 06:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

Microsoft makes virtually all of their software revenue from enterprise sales. And killing a legacy tool as widely-used as CMD will piss them off.
So while I believe Microsoft will not hesitate to give home users the middle finger, I seriously doubt they will kill CMD any time soon.
Everything new is in PowerShell, but we have a lot of old crud that runs in CMD because no one wants to break it.

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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Windows 10 cmd.exe improvements by trawg · 2017-01-05 06:21 · Score: 2

I only just recently discovered that Windows 10 has a bunch of improvements to the command line.
Most notably (at least for me) is the addition of CTRL-backspace as well as well as CTRL-C/V for copy paste. I do a lot of stuff on the command line and the added functionality looks really great.
It's just a shame I'm too scared to upgrade to Windows 10 because of all the additional telemetry that seems like a real pain in the ass to disable! (I did see this open source tool that looks like it might be worth keeping an eye on: https://modzero.github.io/fix-... ).
Re:WTFA by wonkey_monkey · 2017-01-05 06:32 · Score: 2

Click on the fucking link.

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systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
CMD should never have existed in the 1st place. by emil · 2017-01-05 06:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

Windows NT was designed by Dave Cutler, who chose C as the language for the NT kernel. It was the most significant impact of UNIX on NT.
Cutler also designed VMS, and likely had deep familiarity with "Digitial Command Language" (DCL) that is a well-built and powerful command processor itself (if you like writing your scripts in FORTRAN).
Cutler wanted to "get UNIX." Why he allowed a product as shockingly poor as cmd.exe to be written for the NT command shell simply baffles me.
The cmd.exe shell is described as a serial killer by Microsoft employees.
I also disagree with elevating BASH. Steven Borne disliked C, and retrofitted ALGOL on it, not only for the parsing syntax that became BASH, but also on top of the C compiler itself.
Cutler had a chance to see source code for multiple OS implementations and their parsers: RSX11, UNIX sh/csh, DEC DCL, and likely many more. How cmd.exe could have emerged from his group is quite simply beyond me.
1. Re:CMD should never have existed in the 1st place. by MightyMartian · 2017-01-05 07:32 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It took Microsoft a decade and a half to produce a proper shell for Windows NT/Win32. In that time they seemed to try everything else but a shell; VBscript/Jscript, WMI objects, registry commands, but at every iteration they were told "Look at the Bourne shells, for chrissakes, that's what we want!" The deep fear and hatred of all things *nix at Microsoft inevitably lead them to just implement half-ass solutions. Even Powershell is an overly verbose and frankly rather slow shell, but at least it allows for automation of most aspects of the Windows server.
  What it really boils down to me is that Microsoft never really understood, nor did they ever really want to understand how sysadmins used and manipulated servers. Windows carried on the long-standing DOS tradition of pushing in their own direction regardless of what made sense or what the rest of the industry was doing; a willful exercise in refusing to accept long-standing principles of system administration. Everything about Windows administration always made me feel like I was using some idiot's half-ass attempt at remaking Unix, so that you could go to a point, but never beyond that. For years there was a whole industry built on filling in the holes in COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE.
  
  --
  The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
2. Re:CMD should never have existed in the 1st place. by Dutch+Gun · 2017-01-05 09:08 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I think that's because Windows just isn't a command-line culture at heart like *nix. I think instead it's more of a GUI/Application culture, which makes sense, if you think about it, as the focus was on visual applications from the start. As such, a typical Windows developer thinks about embedded scripts inside an application to automate things, and using OLE to inter-operate with other programs or data. *nix developers pass data (often text) from small, focused utility to small focused utility, typically with Bash or another shell as the glue, because it's legacy came from text-only environments with a powerful shell. It's just two different ways of thinking about solving problems, but server administrative problems and application solutions are not necessarily equivalent, as you indicated.
  I'd also posit that this is one reason why *nix tends to do well in server spaces, since working remotely is comfortable even through a simple terminal, and why Windows does well on the desktop, since most users are more comfortable with graphical interfaces than a command-line. That's not the only reason, of course, but I think it contributes.
  
  --
  Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
3. Re:CMD should never have existed in the 1st place. by MightyMartian · 2017-01-05 10:45 · Score: 2
  
  The problem is that GUIs don't tend to lend themselves to automation tasks with quite the same flexibility. I remember back in the 1990s using one of those "GUI batch script" programs that would automate mouse pointer, mouse clicks and the like. It did work for automation tasks, but it was just bloody awful to develop and debug these "scripts", the source of which looked more like some insane man's version of Logo programs. These did improve a bit over time, but they demonstrated where GUIs become obstacles to rather than facilitators of productivity. Of course, in the late 1990s and early 2000s we had vbscript and jscript coupled with WMI, filesystem and registry objects, and this did fill a lot of the gaps, but of course, were only available for certain Windows system and software, not to mention that the various objects didn't expose all properties and methods, so once again you were forced into unseemly hacks.
  What Microsoft refused to acknowledge, though they must have known it as far back as NT 3.5, was that a good scripting language and a set of userland tools that can manipulate even the more esoteric aspects of the operating system are critical to the overall usefulness of a server OS. You're right that Microsoft and its users tended towards believing the GUI gospel, even as they were going into regedit to hack values that weren't supported by the GUI tools. They just refused to work within the KISS philosophy, and thus the GUI-based system tended to become far more complex and error prone than the CLI-based *nix systems (and, using GUI-based *nix tools, these tools too suffer the same problem).
  One of the things that frightens me the most about *nix's evolution, whether that be systemd's binary logging or the greater use of XML for configuration, is that it is starting to move into a more complex direction itself, relying ever more heavily on various libraries as interpreters and intermediaries between sysadmins and the configuration and control apparatuses of a *nix system. This too violates KISS, and creates unnecessary complexity, for no other purpose that I can see than someone wants to be hip and modern.
  
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  The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Re:Wait a second. by slapout · 2017-01-05 07:49 · Score: 4, Funny

Yeah, but it's only a byte, so Windows crashes when it reaches 256...

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CE / WMI / ETC / other telemetry by Hobart · 2017-01-05 08:15 · Score: 3, Interesting

Parent poster summarizes things well.
Debian's PopCon is similar ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/co... )

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Re:Usage telemetry by Camel+Pilot · 2017-01-05 09:49 · Score: 2

You can dig deeply into the OS very easily with PowerShell. WMI, registry, ACLs, etc are all easily and cleanly exposed.
Which also makes it a dream for malicious software.
The problem with Powershell is that you learn it and get use to using it and then when you want to deploy something you find that it is removed or disabled via corporate policy because it is dangerous and you are back to cmd and batch scripts.