Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell

Repetitive, mind-numbing menial tasks are IMPORTANT

It's what stops uppity 2nd-line people from developing ideas above their station.

re: Windows XP was the first PC operating system to drop the MS-DOS

So what happened to Windows 2000 Professional and Windows NT3.5/4 Workstation - which were all PC OSes (and used on PC not server)

Funny thing is ...

... those of us who were already using UNIX[tm] in the early-mid 1980s found MS-DOS's command.com to be a brain-dead command interpreter. To this day, Microsoft hasn't really figured the concept out. IMO, of course.

Back in the 90's I used to teach courses on how to get the most amount of memory out of 640Kb. I also wrote DOS programs (anyone remember EasyEdit - the best text edtor at the time (so Byte said)) which used overlays to move stuff in and out of extended memory to leave the most free real memory.

It was fun in those days. Windows has dumbed us all down.

Alan

From /In the Beginning was the Command Line/ by Neal Stephenson

[...] Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

This is not the place to try to explain why each of the above directories exists, and what is contained in it. At first it all seems obscure; worse, it seems deliberately obscure. When I started using Linux I was accustomed to being able to create directories wherever I wanted and to give them whatever names struck my fancy. Under Unix you are free to do that, of course (you are free to do anything) but as you gain experience with the system you come to understand that the directories listed above were created for the best of reasons and that your life will be much easier if you follow along (within /home, by the way, you have pretty much unlimited freedom).

After this kind of thing has happened several hundred or thousand times, the hacker understands why Unix is the way it is, and agrees that it wouldn't be the same any other way. It is this sort of acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it. This is very difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.

http://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/oral.shtml

Which is to say...

The point being, important lessons were learned building the Unix shell. Yes there's cruft too -- it's over 40 years old. But it's polished smooth, for all that.

PowerShell learns few of those lessons.

George Santayana said: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Henry Spencer modified this to: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

Microsoft is still learning to reinvent Unix -- slowly separating text-mode core OS from graphical layer; learning the importance of a rich command line; learning to write graphical commands that emit said CLI, easing automation. But it's not doing it terribly well.

The trouble is that the Stockholm Syndrome world of corporate IT has been brainwashed into believing that it's the only way and to frantically deny the Great Heresy that is Unix.

Having had a Unix and proprietary mainframe

upbringing, and micros at home, I am less than impressed by Microsoft's efforts on the shell and command-line fronts.

After all, there was clearly a fight over whether or not to continue it at all. Nice to see that sanity prevailed.

That said, its roots in DOS are very clear, it isn't much good as a consequence. Also, useful.

Not dead yet

Curously, there seems to be evidence that the command prompt in Windows still has a tiny spark of life in it. (Or maybe I'm late discovering features in the obscure and hard-to-find documentation.) "set /?" now delivers three screens of help, and includes features like string replacement and delayed variable expansion. You can write surprisingly capable scripts now. Unfortunately there seems to be some rule that any new feature has to be invoked by obscure metacharacters. I suspect that this is a legacy of the original feeble MS-DOS parser.

I'm reasonably sure that the first versions of MS-DOS did offer command-line editing. It used function keys F1 to F9(?) and it's still available in Windows 7, although some of the functions now produce a popup prompt which obviously wasn't there in MS-DOS.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

It's nice to see that Microsoft is finally catching up to where Unix was, circa 1975 :-)

'MS-DOS was lacking other features, too, that many would now consider unforgivable. After typing out an incredibly long command and realising there was an extra letter at the very beginning, all you'd end up with was an unusable chunk of text.' - a bit like when you've composed a txt or email then realise you have a spelling error and are sadly using an iPhone instead of a phone with editing capabilities.

UNICODE/UTF8

PowerShell still doesnt support correctly UNICODE/UTF8 characters.

Try pasting 漢字 into it, it wont work (funnily you can even crash PowerShell that way) even with changing the codepage.

PowerShell is maybe better than an old command terminal, it is fine to manage a Windows system, but it is still way far from a really usable terminal window.

I still have to use a Cygwin terminal or some specific terminal (pythonwin) when handling UNICODE/UTF8 and displaying something more useful than lines of ?

Bash?

The MS-DOS shell, like most things Microsoft, is just a poor copy of a standard program. In this case its 'sh' or, in Gnuese, 'bash'. Even with teaks and enhancements it doesn't do most of things you can do with a real shell, including starting scripts as programs with the '#!' construct.

If you do a lot of embedded work but you're stuck with a Windows platform (a common scenario) then you find that the tools for the most part are 'ix' based, using Cygwin as a shim to give you something like proper OS functionality. This has the side effect of not only giving you a bash to work with if you need it but also being able to use standard commands directly from the Windows command prompt.

Upgrading Windows programming with NIX concepts

For more than a decade, most Microsoft Windows users who were totally ignorant about the power and productivity of the Command Line Interface (CLI) and BASH/other Shell scripting tools in *NIX Operating Systems (OS), condemned the non_Windows OS as "stone age" and unsophisticated, not knowing that a significant amount of administrative work and systems configurations were virtually impossible to perform "efficiently and quickly" via any Windows GUI, especially on Windows Servers, Networking operations and for many qpplications progrmming projects in PC desktop envionments.

Most of my Microsoft Windows severe critics from 8 - 10 years back are "now" mentally blank about their earlier views while they take to (painfully) learning and understanding the inevitably of Windows Powershell in modern technology.

My, how times have changed.

command-line programs, such as diskpart,

Was there a DOS diskpart back then? Surely the default MS-DOS tool was fdisk.

Alias

Don't fret, children. You don't really have to type get-childitem to get the contents of a directory. Those memorable commands still work as aliases. You can also type ls. That's what I usually use. I'm thankful they added that in as a default alias. Switching between Linux and Windows systems I used to always manage to type the wrong one... :)

As for the cmd line being dead. It isn't really. You can still type it from the run box or a powershell window and get all your old commands back.

You can also run commands the old fashioned way in PS by using invoke-expression or invoke-command. Then you can do all sorts of nifty management things with it like error control, writing events to log files or the windows event log, etc.

To all of you die hard batch writers, give PS a chance. You may just expand your scripting chops and stay relevant to the IT world while you are at it...

fondly

"It's easy to look back now and wonder how people put up with such a manual, non-user-friendly system, but personally I still look back on it fondly. Many hours were spent learning every command available, all the switches and what they do."

Yes, indeed. I remember the customer's employee who was working his way through the commands manual one night, and zapped most of the data.

I have done a little scripting with PowerShell, but have not yet warmed to it. I'm not sure why.

Quote: Windows XP was the first PC operating system to drop the MS-DOS Prompt and change it to Command Prompt, due to a change to the NT kernel. The Windows NT family has used the newer Command Prompt since it started with Windows NT 3.1, so it was nothing new on that side of the fence.

Umm Windows NT 3.5 Workstation, Windows NT 3.51 Workstation, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Windows 2000 Professional would like to talk to you behind the bike shed :)