windows powershell

epicstruggle

Passenger on Serenity
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http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell/
I just got out of Bob Muglia's keynote speech where he formally announced Windows PowerShell (previously known as Monad). The key things he announced are:
  1. Monad (MSH) has a new name: Windows PowerShell
  2. Windows PowerShell will RTW (Web download) in Q4 2006
  3. RC1 of Windows PowerShell is available today
  4. Exchange 2007 and MOM will be built upon Windows PowerShell
  5. The next wave of products will be leverage the same architecture - Admin GUI layered on Windows PowerShell

epic
 
Shells are hell (minus the s). :p

Seriously tho... While they may have their niche uses still, a shell is rather antiquidated these days. Strange tho that windows as a market leading OS, hasn't had a decent implementation so far. The toy shell delivered as standard compares more to the one you got with kickstart 1.x for the Amiga. ;)

Kickstart 2.0 had a much more powerful shell with extensive wildcard and scripting support, pipes, aliases and so forth. My shell-fu was relatively weak even back then, but those in the know say that for its time the shell was quite good.

One would hope that this powers hell at least matches a now nearly 14 year old product! :LOL:
 
Guden Oden said:
Shells are hell (minus the s). :p

Seriously tho... While they may have their niche uses still, a shell is rather antiquidated these days.

In what respect? Shells are basically command-line interfaces to scripting languages -- are you suggesting that scripting languages are "soooo 2005"???
 
I just hope that this doesn't turn out the same way Windows Scripting Host did...

Having said that, I've been following Monad for a while now and it looks excellent. I can't wait to try out RC1 later today.
 
A good shell with a load of associated tools is incredibly flexible and powerful. Anyone who's spent any time using a UNIX shell will know what I am talking about. Tasks that are complex and cumbersome in a GUI become relatively easy for somone with a small amount of knowledge and a shell script.

It's bit ridiculous that in this day and age the PC is still well behind the standard shell abilities of UNIX, or even small home machines like the Amiga was fifteen years ago.
 
I always liked the MSDOS shell, it's simple and easy, fine for end users (to launch applications and write small, basic batch files). compare dir /o and ls -l , which one looks better? more important, dir /? and man ls ..
dir /? tells everything you need to know in two dozen lines of text, man ls is more like hundreds of pages of confusing crap.

then the DOS shell doesn't seem to have the grep, tail, head, cut etc. tools. but it has for, redirections and pipes ;). and from cmd.exe you have tab completion and commands to list and kill processes, I don't know what else.
*sh seems way more capable, with all the GNU tools and stuff.

MSH seems much better. I was taught csh in Uni, we had to do the "get filesizes" example, but were never told about awk.. after removing first row with tail we had to use "cut" and count characters to cut at the right place. . I thought, great, we can do that text parsing I can't do in DOS/windows ; but that's quite retarded.
now the example in the article is what I expected : get-childitem | measure-object -Property length
instead of that retarded, 1980's parsing crap, you pipe an object and that's all :)
 
it would be nice if we got a new console window.. one like xterm which can be resized and maxed like any normal window. now it looks like it's still made so that apps think they are running in CGA text mode. .
 
it would be nice if we got a new console window.. one like xterm which can be resized and maxed like any normal window. now it looks like it's still made so that apps think they are running in CGA text mode. .

please MS, have the old one for legacy and a real console for the new command line stuff !
this makes windows's text mode experience frustrating..
 
Blazkowicz_ said:
I always liked the MSDOS shell, it's simple and easy, fine for end users (to launch applications and write small, basic batch files). compare dir /o and ls -l , which one looks better? more important, dir /? and man ls ..
dir /? tells everything you need to know in two dozen lines of text, man ls is more like hundreds of pages of confusing crap.
That's because ls is a lot more powerful and can tell you about a lot more about the more complex unix filesystem. If you don't want to read the man pages, you just need to look at the first few lines where the syntax is printed.

Like almost everything in the unix shell(s) that have been around for years, it's over-engineered to do everything and the kitchen sink, but that doesn't mean it can't be used at a very simple and basic level. Alternatively it can be combined with the other shell commands to make some very sophisticated tools. That's the kind of powerful shell that has been long missing from the Microsoft OSes.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
If you don't wnt to read the man pages, you just need to look at the first few lines where the syntax is printed.

No, thats definitely not enough in most cases (or I'm just dumb, but that hasn't been proven yet) and that's what to this date annoys me most in all of the different *nixes I've used over the years.
It would be so simple - just put some friggin' examples in there at the beginning that cover the most used usage types with a short, but still as comprehensive as possible description.
That would have quite often helped me tremenduously when I was searching for the right flag (again).
 
Blazkowicz_ said:
I always liked the MSDOS shell, it's simple and easy, fine for end users (to launch applications and write small, basic batch files). compare dir /o and ls -l , which one looks better? more important, dir /? and man ls ..
dir /? tells everything you need to know in two dozen lines of text, man ls is more like hundreds of pages of confusing crap.

man pages is a separate documentation system. The fact that it even exists and is kept up-to-date on unix systems is a big plus.

The question is really if "dir /?" or "ls --help" is more natural. The answer is obviously the latter.

IMO MS should provide proper support for Cygwin. Bash, Csh and sh on Cygwin is already pretty damn useful. The end goal is to get sysadmins to exchange their unix boxen with windows ones, right ? Making porting of maintenance scripts easier by providing a compatible environment would help a lot IMO

Cheers
 
Snyder said:
No, thats definitely not enough in most cases (or I'm just dumb, but that hasn't been proven yet) and that's what to this date annoys me most in all of the different *nixes I've used over the years.

The examples are at the end. All the information is there, you just have to read the bits you want. Normal man pages take the form of syntax, flag options, examples. Given that almost everything has lots of options, even the basic tools need to have a lot of info in the man pages, let alone the really sophisticated tools like sed or awk.

These are shell tools that have been expanded over the last thirty years, so they can do an awful lot of stuff if you want them too. That's what makes them powerful, especially when linked together. That's why they need proper man pages, not just a few lines of syntax that you get with MSDOS. They don't try and include this info in the executable because it would bloat up every program with pages of uneccesary text, and that what the man pages are for.

I don't see unix going back to the days of (literally) an eight foot shelf of manuals which were just the man pages printed out and bound.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
The examples are at the end.
the fact is, man pages are not as good as they can be. they are good enough for *nix gurus, but if one is expirienced yet not enough to be guru, reading man pages can be very frustrating IMHO
 
chavvdarrr said:
the fact is, man pages are not as good as they can be. they are good enough for *nix gurus, but if one is expirienced yet not enough to be guru, reading man pages can be very frustrating IMHO

All the information is there, you just have to read it - better that not having enough. Man pages are designed to be a manual and reference, they are not designed to be a teaching aid for beginners to the unix shell. There are plenty of books on the market that will do that.

If you can't read a man page, there's a nice easy GUI with buttons and windows and everything but personally I've never had a problem getting the information I need from man pages, even when I was a beginner to unix many, many years ago.

Fact is that if you are going to use the shell and need the man pages as opposed to point 'n' click, you are going to be a more advanced user, doing more advanced tasks.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
The examples are at the end. All the information is there, you just have to read the bits you want. Normal man pages take the form of syntax, flag options, examples. Given that almost everything has lots of options, even the basic tools need to have a lot of info in the man pages, let alone the really sophisticated tools like sed or awk.

I know the structure of man pages, and I know about the examples (which quite often leave a lot to be desired IMO concerning being efficient, but that's another issue). And to be honest "Read the bits you want" is not the issue, it's more like "Find the relevant bits you want" that can get tedious.
it's good and necessary that there are lots of info in the man pages, but that doesn't prevent anyone to add a user-friendly quick reference, or does it?
Man pages are well defined and usually quite comprehensive. But accessibility is something they sorely lack.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
All the information is there, you just have to read it - better that not having enough. Man pages are designed to be a manual and reference, they are not designed to be a teaching aid for beginners to the unix shell. There are plenty of books on the market that will do that.
Every time I see someone writing "X is as good as it can be and can't be made better" I want to scream and kill :D
 
chavvdarrr said:
Every time I see someone writing "X is as good as it can be and can't be made better" I want to scream and kill :D
Every time I see someone saying "if only this chocolate cake was more like a strawberry ice-cream" I want to scream and kill too.

Man pages are focussed on being what they are targeted at being - nothing more, nothing less. If we cut them down, they wouldn't contain the full info they do. If we expanded them out, they'd be bloatware like MSDN where it takes you ages just to find the relevant entry with an animated little paperclip tapping your screen.

Man pages are what they are, if you want something else, there are other avenues for providing it. They still work on a tty or dumb terminal, and can be used in single user mode even when the GUI isn't there. They don't detract from the power of a good shell, they only provide some of the support information for it.
 
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