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."

Re: No Thanks

Ok, but does bash or ksh run on windows? This is for their own OS, not unix.


Of course it does, silly [cygwin.com].

Re: No Thanks

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: No Thanks

Why is everyone immediately saying cygwin? Windows Services for Unix is the official release of ksh for Windows.

Re: No Thanks

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

Why do the unix zealots always dismiss...

Because we're Unix zealots dumb ass. Get with the program.

30 years in computer years? About 1000 years

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.

Re: No Thanks

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 :)

Re:Drop the marketing jargon for a minute!

For about ten years since the dawn of Windows 95, Microsoft has spent a fortune downplaying the power of a CLI in favor of the all-powerful GUI. After all, why is it that cmd.exe and family are so incredibly anemic? [...] Everything must interact with the GUI, leaving only limited functionality to the shell.

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 /system32 that I never ever came close to using.
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.

C:\Documents and Settings\ms>taskkill
ERROR: Invalid Syntax. Neither /FI nor /PID nor /IM are specified.
Type "TASKKILL /?" for usage.

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. ;)

Re: No Thanks

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.

Re: No Thanks (not UNIX, VMS!)

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly

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 [microsoft.com] 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 .NET class derived from our base class and tag it with a NOUN and VERB. The properties of that class become PARAMETERS.

Here's a Screenshot

Here's a Screenshot:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\>

This is what Microsoft has been "fighting" for!

A command line. How innovative!

This is fantastic news.

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?

Monad?

What kind of name is that? Sounds like a command shell that had one testicle removed.

monad

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.

Re:If it's good....

That would be hard, MSH leverages .NET quite extensively. You might see a Mono Shell, or a Python Shell using the same concepts though.

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.

Re:If it's good....

It's rather sad to see people dismissing this so quickly.

That's the weakness of the Microsoft brand. Whatever they do is usually designed poorly. Even when the design is Ok, the implementation is bad. Even if properly implemented, the thing will be crippled by several of -- at least -- the following:

• having to support legacy concepts (such as drive letters);
• licensing concerns (like XP workstation allowing only one user at a time);
• wide-spread security concerns resulting in the feature being turned off by default on most installations;
• wide-spread fears of accidental and intentional incompatability;
• being only available as part of an expensive (and extensive!) upgrade;
• etc.

Their bad (as in both -- nasty and foolish) ways of doing things are catching up with them all the time.

Re:If it's good....

having to support legacy concepts (such as drive letters);

Whilst the UNIX style unified directory hierarchy is aesthetically pleasing to computer scientists, I've never been convinced that it's really more usable. On Windows, people can learn a few simple letter to concept mappings "A" is the floppy disk, "C" is the stuff inside the Computer, "D" is the cD-rom drive, "E" is their usbEE kEE. Obviously not all systems will be like that, but it's common enough. On UNIX systems the location of floppy disks, installed programs, mounted USB keys and so on tend to move around unpredictably.

Incidentally, talking of legacy concepts, what do you think "mounting" is? It dates from the time when you had to mount tapes onto their reels!

licensing concerns (like XP workstation allowing only one user at a time);

I don't see how this would affect a command shell designed for personal use. I also don't understand how it only allows one user at a time - in the copies of XP I've seen multiple users can log in at once, then you can rapidly switch between them. If you are thinking of X and terminal servers, well, you can have a command line without that. Look at MacOS.

wide-spread security concerns resulting in the feature being turned off by default on most installations;

There's no evidence I can see that suggests this would be off by default. Actually MSH could be a lot more secure than the UNIX shell as it can be fully controlled by .NET Code Access Security, which is more fine grained than traditional UNIX permissions.

wide-spread fears of accidental and intentional incompatability;

By adding a new end-user feature? That never stopped them adding themes, Media Player, MSN Messenger, etc. Compatibility concerns for something totally new are far less serious.

being only available as part of an expensive (and extensive!) upgrade;

In contrast to what? Microsoft backport far more stuff than Linux vendors do, and Apple basically doesn't backport anything at all. That's $120 per upgrade, thanks very much.

Seriously. The guys working on MSH have blogs, I read a few, and they seemed very sharp to me. The MSH API seems quite lightweight and I suspect you'll be able to create new commandlets very easily - far easier than you can create new command line tools on Linux. Some of the examples they showed would require thousands of lines of code to write on Linux once you take into account the build system, the fact that they're usually written in C, the text parsing with extra checks for buffer overflows etc. Yet using the MSH API they fitted onto a single screen of text.

I'm not too worried, I don't use Linux over Windows just because of bash (surprise), I use it because it's Free (and it has some other neat features I like). Actually, most UNIX shells suck ass. Their builtin programming languages are hideously primitive, unintuitive, and are easy to screw up. Getting basic information out of common tools requires a guru-level knowledge of sed, awk and Perl style regular expressions which are themselves primitive, backwards and unintuitive.

You'd have to work pretty hard to produce a command line worse than the UNIX one (and no, cmd.exe does not count as "working hard", I suspect it's had about a weeks worth of work in the last decade).

I guess the site's running it ....

... doesn't have a web interface...

Visitors We are sorry but this site is experiencing difficulties at this time. Please return shortly! Thank you for your patience. Webmaster - please contact support as soon as possible.

First impressions

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

"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

Both must be learned.

Both must be learned and remembered. Longer names allow for an easier to remember naming convention that can then help you remember or find the command you wanted. Two letter commands are certainly easier to type, but as others have mentioned the command completion in the interactive shell should take care of that.

Re:First impressions

Then use ps, it's a built-in alias for get-process.

MSH>help ps

NAME
get-process

SYNOPSIS
get-process -Id id | -ProcessName name

SHORT DESCRIPTION
Lists processes currently running

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

-Id id
[int[]]
[pipeline input allowed]
Comma separated list of process identifiers that specify the processes to ge
t

-ProcessName name
[string[]]
[pipeline input allowed]
Comma separated list of process names that specify the processes to get

-Exclude name
[ArrayList]
Comma separated list of process names to be excluded from the output.

---
The Command will enumerate processes from local machine and output System.Di
agnostics.Process object(s). The command will write the process object to th
e output pipeline one by one. The Command will take parameters like ID(Proce
ss Identifier) or Process Name from command line. The Command will return th
e corresponding system.diagnostics.process for the supplied ID or ProcessNam
e parameter(s).

This command also supports the ubiquitous parameters:
-Debug (-db), -ErrorAction (-ea), -ErrorVariable (-ev)
-OutputBuffer (-ob), -OutputVariable (-ov), and -Verbose (-vb)

NOTES
Exclude only works for process name.

EXAMPLES
get-process
Returns all running processes

get-process svc*
Returns all processes with names starting with svc

PROVIDER SPECIFIC

DYNAMIC PARAMETERS

Re:First impressions

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!

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!

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.

This tools are "commandlets." Being able to pipe .Net objects into mini applications with the full .NET framework available for use will be increadably useful.

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 /. junk filter)

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 /. junk filter)

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

Re:whoosh!

" 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.

Re:whoosh!

$ 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:whoosh!

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.

It's just me, or you just said the same thing twice?

Unix has a lot of command-line tools, but it also has tons of libraries with no commandline attached to them.

There's nothing wrong with the Microsoft's DLL aproach either, they just have to provide a command line for the DLLs they want, programs which will happen to parse the command-line switches and pipes and use the DLLs to execute the real job. It's in fact a "perfect" policy/mechanism balance. Many unix command-line tools don't provide a library to be used by programs, very often I wish they would.

One Perl

What's wrong with just running the Perl debugger, for an interactive shell? If the *nix shells were as limited in their reach into the OS APIs as the Windows commandline UIs have been, I'd use "perl -de 1" instead of bash or sh. As it is, I use that Perl shell for most commandline programming, especially for any data processing tasks. And a Perl shell has thousands of existing scripts, most of which work on Windows as well as any other platform, and are easily customized to script Windows apps. Even more, the Perl platform has lots of modules that embed programmable clients to Windows apps into scripts, and lots of scripts that bundle them together. Why not use old all-encompassing Perl, rather than the new, strictly limited Monad?

One benefit to Monad.

.. it won't be so startling when you get the blue screen of death, seeing that you're already in a text screen mode.

Anything would better!

Trying to script using cmd, vbscript, wsh, wmi, adsi technologies compared to the userland in Unix systems for core system administration is a complete hassle. I have ended using Perl w/ Win32::* extensions and a lot of backticking and substitutions to get the job done. I will be looking forward to any improvements that Monad provides. I really hope that Microsoft looks toward BSD (Mac OS X) and Linux systems and takes to heart the ease that shell scripting in these systems provides. And for God's sake, make it easier to determine the IP address associated to a printer in a clustered virtual print queue! (Hint: you have to use an undocumented DLL that can only be found in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory in an unlit cellar with a sign on the door saying 'beware of the leopard' section of the Resource Kit).

Or you could just download the release-quality one

Here [cygwin.com]

backslashes

While they are on their way to being more Unix-like how about fixes their broken backslashes. It would be nice to be able to do:

cd '/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox'

Re:backslashes

And yet another classic example of tunnel vision Unix bigotry. If it isn't exactly the way I learned it, it's broken.

Here's a clue, try learning something new once in a while...

Re:backslashes

Yes, there is a reason for it. The original MS-DOS didn't have directories and used / for command-line switches where unix uses - (e.g. copy /b or dir /p). When MS-DOS 2 came out with directory support, they wanted to stay compatible (so you could use batch files from DOS 1, etc.) but with the primitive state of the applications back then, using / as both the command switch thing and directory separator would confuse them, so MS decided to use \ as the directory separator instead.

Monad?!?!

"What should we name it?"

"Let's combine 'Microsoft' and 'Gonad'. It'll make Unix jealous."

shell bias

fellows, does it really matter? i hear Monad is quite good. but then so is bash. so is emacs shell. or perl/python/lisp interpreter of the day...

honestly, the shell is just another language, the utility and efficiency of which depends on the environment, the use, the user, and a million other things.

so stop bashing Monad as a unix wannabe. unix didn't invent the commandline anyway. this is like a blind man making fun of a deaf man.

They tried this before

I didn't write this but I wish I had been there.

" 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/quickie s.html [flutterby.com]

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

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.

Does this mean?

Does this mean that tracert will become traceroute and dir become ls? Good god the implecations are huge.

what can UNIX learn from this?

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.

massive case of second system effect

Microsoft programmers should look up "second system effect": they keep making the same mistake again and again.

If you want to see some good (or at least interesting) directions people have taken shells into, there are Plan 9 rc (same idea as sh, but cleaned up), fish (better interactive features), and Tcl/Tk (shell-like programming for a full scripting language, including the ability to embed Java and C#/CLR objects). And if you want a full scripting language, Perl, Python, and Ruby fit the bill.

A note to FOSS programmers: if you are really itching to clone Monad, please do yourself and everybody else a favor, implement your clone in Perl or Python: a Monad-like shell becomes almost trivial in those languages because they have all the reflection capabilities you need, and because they already have all the hookups to Java, C#, and COM that you might want.

Quick Tour of Monad

I wrote a short article on Monad [stevex.org] as well.

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.

Re:That's all well and good

The question is, who would really be interested in it at all?

Well, Windows network admins? Say what you will about Windows, most of it's true. But lot's of serious companies use it, and some of them even hire smart people to admin their systems. Could be usful for something like that, maybe.

Re:That's all well and good

People who uses windows, obviously. Most of Microsoft users do not analize what they use - they just use it, and they've though that buttons are better than scripting just because Microsoft has been telling them that for years. Now that microsoft says scripting is useful, they'll think it's useful. They don't know if scripting is "good" or "bad", they're not CS people (and even if they are they may be clueless) so they think whatever they're told to think

Re:That's all well and good

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.

lol, personalized error ...

"Server Error in '/' Application."

Is computing really becoming pervasive ?
At least it has a sense of humor 8)

'Server Error in '/' Application.

Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".

Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.

'