A Guided Tour of the Microsoft Command Shell

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.'"

Slightly Wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken from "system requirements"Requires the .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package Beta 2 (x86) (see Related Downloads below).
Note that the "Supporting Operating Systems" list above is slightly wrong: the release is supported on Windows XP SP2, not Windows XP Embedded SP2.

Microsoft can't even get its own system requirements right... I someone expects a robust security infrastructure...

Re:Oh, I am so excited!

[bozho]

4nt/bash + cygwin tools + python/perl.

Re:Who wrote the introduction?

[cnelzie]

There's far more of a difference between Windows XP and Windows 2000, then just a graphical skin. The methods for accessing a handful of configuration settings windows has altered and in some cases, those configuration modules have changed significantly on their own.

    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:Reminds me of Python..

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript has syntax like that too

Re:An open source clone?

[zootm]

They're similar, but not really the same. Python isn't geared towards being a command shell (although obviously after importing the right packages you can use it as one).

For those who want to download . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . but don't want to create a Passport account, this username/password from BugMeNot worked for me:

[e-mail]
msdn2005

Re:On The Pipe

[zootm]

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:

You can essentially make an alias in MSH that associates a short name with the full path of one of the Cygwin command line apps. It's nice being able to occasionally use awk, sed and grep from the MSH command line.

msh> new-alias grep "C:\Cygwin\bin\grep.exe"
msh> get-childitem | grep blah

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.

Re:Ars and Windows

[/ASCII]

Nothing new. Go back and read a few older Ars articles, like the ones about the PS2, or the POWER architecture. Ars always produces very high quality writing, but they obviously write about things they think are really cool, hence they often give an over-positive spin on things.

Re:A shell is nice but...

[alecks]

Yes, you can. you can change registry settings from the command line. Yes, you have to know the exact location, but that's like saying 'you have to know how to use a computer to use a computer'.
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...

[TummyX]

If you had read the article you would have discovered that MSH includes a managed virtualfilesystem-like provider for the registry that allows you to navigate the registry and read/write settings.

Huh? It's only 22 MB...

[Otto]

320 MB? Where in hell did you see that? The .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package Beta 2 weighs in at 22 MB. Still hefty, I grant you, but certainly not 300+ megs.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=7ABD8C8F-287E-4C7E-9A4A-A4ECFF40FC8E&displa ylang=en [microsoft.com]

Now, for a command line, I grant you, that's heavy. But a) It's still beta and b) It's the framework for all .NET 2.0 apps. The framework is this big collection of shared libraries used by all .NET apps whether they are C++, C#, yadda yadda yadda... You get the gist. No worse than getting Java, really. MSH is just implemented using .NET, basically. The 1.1 framework stuff is built into XP's Service Pack 1 and later, and I'm sure that the 2.0 framework will be built into Vista.

UNC Paths

[TheDawgLives]

It doesn't seem to be much better cmd.exe other than it actually supports UNC paths. That was one thing that always pissed me off about cmd and cygwin. How can you NOT support UNC paths in windows 98+?

direct download

[rednuhter]

This download offers you the benefits of registering with Microsoft. Click the Continue button near the top of this page to register.
no thanks, I would rather just download it.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/6/746ec 8ff-c4eb-41f3-884e-981bf39997b7/monad_b2_50215_x86 .zip [microsoft.com]
taken from
http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/CommentView,guid,8b2 6fea1-723d-4bd6-93c1-19d681af9276.aspx [leeholmes.com]
(which also has the 64 bit version)

Re:Quick! Open Source Monkeys Fly

[Shaklee39]

That joke has been used every time a story on monad has been posted. There have been at least 3 stories. You are not funny or original.

Have you tried IPython?

[tartarugo]

Take a look at http://ipython.scipy.org [scipy.org]. You can actually use it as a shell replacement. Quoth the homepage:

IPython is a free software project (released under the BSD license) which tries to:

1. Provide an interactive shell superior to Python's default. IPython has many features for object introspection, system shell access, and its own special command system for adding functionality when working interactively. It tries to be a very efficient environment both for Python code development and for exploration of problems using Python objects (in situations like data analysis).
   
2. Serve as an embeddable, ready to use interpreter for your own programs. IPython can be started with a single call from inside another program, providing access to the current namespace. This can be very useful both for debugging purposes and for situations where a blend of batch-processing and interactive exploration are needed.
   
3. Offer a flexible framework which can be used as the base environment for other systems with Python as the underlying language. Specifically scientific environments like Mathematica, IDL and Mathcad inspired its design, but similar ideas can be useful in many fields.

Re:Who wrote the introduction?

[yhamade]

Okay, I don't normally latch onto so such an advert piece of flamebait, but this one I couldn't pass on...

And so can all the malware, spyware, crippleware, middleware, trojans, worms, viruses, and anyone with even a mild desire to make life difficult for people around them.

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!

Registry + ActiveX + a functional shell (finally) + .NET == cataclysmic user-base catastrophe waiting to happen

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".

.NET is once again a programming API. It's nothing *NEW* its just a uniform model that Microsoft is developing to. Yes, it makes things easier for developers. Yes, this means that instead of the script kiddies having to decipher the Win32API docs, they can use the more developer friendly access methods. But as I said before, any "code" in any language on any platform can be "exploited".

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.