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A Guided Tour of the Microsoft Command Shell
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Oct 24, 2005 07:40 AM
from the its-cool-to-have-features dept.
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.'"
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A Guided Tour of the Microsoft Command Shell
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Re:The true meaning of "msh" (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone knows that "msh" really stands for "Microsoft Hell".
And once people realize it is crippled there will be a gsh (Gate Shell) and a bsh (Ballmer Shell) as equally handycaped as the msh. A legal suit will follow from Google for gsh but the bsh will last.
Wouldn't it be easier just to get a copy of Linux and call it MS-Linux? I thought Microsoft thought all of UNIX/POSIX was crap and you didn't need a shell?
Re:The true meaning of "msh" (Score:5, Funny)
$>
or maybe a few more...
$$$>
ah, what the heck...
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$>
Re:The true meaning of "msh" (Score:5, Funny)
bsh> developers
developers
bsh> developers
developers
bsh> developers
YEAH!
Re:The true meaning of "msh" (Score:4, Funny)
Who wrote the introduction? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://cafepress.com/phototravel?pid=5934485)
And what's with the "unleash" keyword? Do these people really think in terms, that glossy ads use to compare the advertised products with animals?
Re:Who wrote the introduction? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
In that case, that's a visual style that's changing only the aspects of the UI Windows XP changed. Windows border styles and new flashy button hover effects, etc. Think of it as a different theme/skin, not a way for them to change the UI design guidelines. "OK" will still always be followed by "Cancel", group boxes will still group UI elements with a relation, menus will still be part of the applications and not the dsektop, combo boxes will still be recommended only in "little space" situations, and so on.
Actually, Microsoft has released preliminary design guidelines for Vista [microsoft.com], and I was surprised to see how much can be directly applied, and is even recommended to be applied like that, to Windows XP.
Also, even in Windows Vista, just like in XP, can you still apply the Windows 2000 look & feel via a flip of a switch. That if anything should show that all they're really doing are mostly just applying new skins to sell their product, and not coming up with new guidelines that indeed would alienate their broad customer base. If I'm at some user that have applied some simple settings, I often lose myself in thinking I'm working on a Windows 2000 workstation when I'm in reality on XP.
Re:Who wrote the introduction? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
To say that there won't be changes beyond simple "Graphical skins" simply does not hold with the historical perspective of the sweeping changes with each major iteration of Windows.
Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 to Windows 98 to WindowsMe, there were underlying configuration changes that made learning the "new" OS important.
Windows NT 3.5 to Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 to Windows XP also included significant configuration setting alterations that were far more drastic then the "Consumer Level" Windows Operating Systems.
Re:Who wrote the introduction? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Are they keeping things like "OK" and "Cancel? Yes. Are you able to change the look back to Windows 2000 (well, sort of). Yes. They do things like this so people don't need to totally retrain.
Is the user interface anything like Windows XP, under the hood? No. God no.
The entire thing has been rewritten from the ground up. Everything is a
What this means is they CAN make drastic changes down the road by simply changing a few objects. Everything will inherit down. Ever notice that buttons can be totally dissimilar from one app to the next, and all MS has been able to do is (for example) but a blue highlight around them? That's because the UI has been so cripped.
The new UI is simple, beautiful and brilliant. Is it completely different than Windows XP? No. It's not intended to be. The goal, like
Re:Who wrote the introduction? (Score:4, Informative)
Do you know what the definition of "malware" [reference.com] is? Any code can be malware. If you sent someone a shell script to shutdown their system and they think its a link to their favorite pr0n site, guess what? Its malware!
Then by using your logic, so is giving someone the keys to a car.... The registry is a centralized database of configuration settings for the OS and applications. Its no different than having 5000 configuration files scattered through a system, other than of course that its in a centralized database. IMNSHO the *nixes can benefit from this concept. Yes, there are limitations, and there should be better security within it, but nothing is stopping someone from hacking Httpd.conf either.
Active-X is a development platform. It can be exploited just like anything else, people create java based virii all the time, the problem is users are dumb enough to just hit "yes install this crap on my system".
Here's a nice quote for you:
'We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.' -- Titus Livius
Now, yes, these things make it *EASIER* for people to take advantage of. However, they were always there, they're there on any platform, its just whether or not people take advantage of them in malice. The better question is "What's MS actually doing to MITIGATE these problems?" Well, I think they finally took a page from the *nix (linux/unix) world and implemented this "revolutionary" feature with Vista: User Account Protection [microsoft.com] What the hell is that you ask? Well, in simplest terms, its sudo. When UAP is enabled, any action you take that requires "administrator" access, will now prompt you for credentials to do so, even if you are an administrator. Yeap, you guessed it, even admins are no longer admins. What's that do to applications? Well, thats for the developers to fix! But it "fixes" one of the most blatant issues most people had with Windows security: that their grandmother had to be an administrator on her home PC to use her copy of Quicken, and because of that, she also had 5kajillian pieces of spyware installed.
Re:Who wrote the introduction? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the first time I've ever seen someone refer to a database as a single point of failure.
Always good to see new things.Re:Who wrote the introduction? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only legitimate (and I'm using the term loosely) function that the Registry performs is to make it virtually impossible to move a major application from one machine to another without running the actual installation program. In effect, it's an intrinsic anti-piracy technique. Sometimes I think that's the only reason that it's still there.
Re:Who wrote the introduction? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday June 06 2006, @01:50PM)
That is what uniformity is. Changing colors / visual schema is not uniformity. That's like saying a green car is not uniform to a blue car. You can still drive it with the knowlege you learned in drivers ed.
-everphilski-
Quick! Open Source Monkeys Fly (Score:5, Funny)
I propose we call it Gonad.
It will be the dogs bollocks.
Re:Better name: Gonuts (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Quick! Open Source Monkeys Fly (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Quick! Open Source Monkeys Fly (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://trolltalk.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 11, @07:43PM)
impressive (Score:4, Insightful)
>>> import kudzu
>>> kudzu.probe(kudzu.CLASS_HD, kudzu.BUS_IDE, kudzu.PROBE_ALL)
[Desc: MAXTOR 6L040J2 Driver: ignore
Device: hda , Desc: ST360021A
Driver: ignore Device: hdc
, Desc: Maxtor 6Y120P0 Driver: ignore
Device: hde ]
etc, and python is easily expandible to cover ALL the system. What makes MSH rock is that it's a python-like programming languaje PLUS a user-oriented (user=administrator) shell like bash. In linux we're used to program scripts with python, then pass the data through pipes to bash to do something with it. Crappy. When you have to do things like "command | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | cut -d ':' -f 1" to get some data, you know something is WRONG.
The cool thing about MSH that its a SUBSTITUTE to bash/cmd.exe, not a "complement" like python is. Is not that bash or python are bad, but bash-like shells are 30-years-old unchanged technology. Fortunately, there're people writing user-oriented python-based shells, like http://ipython.scipy.org/ [scipy.org]
Re:impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.nymar.demon.co.uk/)
Agreed. In this case it's the coder, who should really have enough nous to print the data in the format in which he intends to use it. That's hardly rocket science, is it?
Of course, if you didn't write the python script and don't have the time and/or skill to hack it, you might nd up using cut and the like to get the data in the format you need. The cool think about that is that it's possible. I don't know if the same can be said under MSH, but it seems unlikely - the focus of Monad seems to be .NET integration, not a stream based filtering command line environment.
Then again, maybe you didn't even write the wrapper script and don't understand anything. If so you can always troll slashdot as an AC and get some astroturfing in.
Re:impressive (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://home.comcast.net/~silverspurg | Last Journal: Thursday December 01 2005, @10:11PM)
Followed closely by: It's a security nightmare waiting to happen. If people think BASH viruses are a potential problem then imagine the full horrors of ActiveX with access to a system shell. At least Mozilla exploits don't lead to "rm -rf
Re:impressive (Score:4, Insightful)
"I'm just not seeing anything in here but a horribly tortured object oriented syntax and a reexpression of MS' nightmarish implementation of the common "--help"."
The object oriented stuff provides extra features. You can still alias all the old stuff to the usual commands, and it apparently does so by default.
"Considering the decades of command line functionality which sh type shells have, apparently MSH is only dreaming of what BASH can do."
Please explain again how you think it's the shell's fault that other applications don't support its features. Oh and btw, `echo 'html-stuff' | firefox` results in a blank browser window.
An open source clone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:An open source clone? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://krenzel.info/)
Regards,
Steve
Some Wise Man Said (Score:4, Insightful)
-- Henry Spencer<br>
Usenet signature, November 1987
Another Wise Man Said... (Score:5, Interesting)
- Voltaire
And so did another (Score:5, Funny)
(http://suso.suso.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 09 2004, @12:03AM)
-Suso
Re:And so did another (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.vanderlee.com/)
Google Shell (Score:5, Funny)
It's nuts
New website..... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.vintagevolts.com/ | Last Journal: Monday March 27 2006, @12:34PM)
Specializing in Unix bashing (somewhat of an ironic statement)
Jeez... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.justgiving.com/garethowen | Last Journal: Thursday October 31 2002, @02:07PM)
Re:Jeez... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://thepreacher.cac2.net/)
It was the same person that wrote the dialogue for research breakthroughs in Alpha Centauri.
the text-based shell is the nexus of computational control and the point at which proper articulation of will can transform commands into consequences
- Col. Corazon Santiago Spartan Programmer's Manual
Re:Jeez... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday May 27 2005, @08:11AM)
My favorite.
On The Pipe (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://neon.polkaroo.net/~mhoye/blarg/)
Re:On The Pipe (Score:4, Informative)
Very true. I think this system could work well though, despite not having used it, but I guess I'll have to give it a go to really know. Kinda worried about the noted limitations of its tab-completion though — that's one feature that I'd, at the very least, find difficult to let go.
As for more arbitrary pipes, there is some degree of good news in the discussion thread which goes along with the article, in particular this little gem:
I'm not sure how far this aliasing can be taken, it's possible it only works on text rather than bitstreams, but it's encouraging that the *nix command line apps can be aliased and seem to "play nice" with the MSH system.
A shell is nice but... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.kibbee.ca/)
Re:A shell is nice but... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.olympiacreations.com/)
Yes you can install ALL programs from the command line... expecially the ones designed to use the standard windows installer (.MSI). It has some powerful commandline options, which are universal across all apps that use it. Search for msiexec.exe
You can do everything and anything from the command line. WSH/WMI add a great deal more functionality as well, and you can still keep it at the command line.
Re:A shell is nice but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A shell is nice but... (Score:5, Funny)