Re: Power Shell

Jesse Hogan wrote:
When I first heard about Monad I thought "what a cool idea, too bad
Microsoft is doing it". I only know about it in theory but it seems
like the idea would be appealing to object oriented people (like Java
types). I wouldn't mind seeing an OSS version of this. I love command
line programming but I have noticed that the values you get by parsing
stdout with regex can be a little unreliable when it comes to
production scripts and apps. Though, I have to admit, its hard imagine
a unix implementation of this where everything else is so text oriented.


A pipe has nothing to do with text or ASCII. It is a simple
point-to-point link that can transport any type of binary data. So I
don't really know what you are talking about. Everything you need is in
place. Maybe you should elaborate a little bit about the concrete
problem you are seeing.

Java has everything it needs to pass objects in a shell environment from
one process to another over a pipe. Just serialize your object or
transform it to XML or whatever you like and then write it to standard
out. The next process can then easily read it from stdin, deserialize it
or parse the XML stream, and do whatever might look apropriate.

You could even use java.rmi or CORBA or something similar to achieve the
same with different technologies.

So I am unable to understand where you see a limitation in the existing
shell and pipe semantics of UNIX. Microsoft simply adds some programs to
their special "shell" to ease the way of getting started. I don't know
what concrete problems they are addressing or what specific objects they
are supporting to be "passed around via pipes" - probably something
concerning OLE or the like.

But my point is that everything you need to do whatever Microsoft is
announcing for Vista, or whatever it will be called when it will be
released, is already existing in UNIX. Maybe it is just the way of
understanding what we are doing with a shell.

E.g.
gzip -dc my.tar.gz | tar xf -
does uncompress the my.tar.gz "object" passes the decompressed
"tape-stream-object" to tar, which then extract the files that were
serialized into this stream object and saves them in the file system.

So please: give me an example that I learn to understand in what way
Microsoft eases the understanding of handling "objects" with a shell. In
UNIX the basic idea is that everything is a file. Just exchange the word
"file" with the word "object" and you are there, aren't you?
.

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