5 ms·
If Cmd is not going away, why doesn't MS invest in it and make it more useful? It could learn a few things from xterm, bash, etc.
by mtdewcmu 10y ago
If Cmd is not going away, why doesn't MS invest in it and make it more useful? It could learn a few things from xterm, bash, etc.
- serge2k 10y agoThey have powershell for that.
- mtdewcmu 10y agoThey said themselves that PowerShell is not a replacement for Cmd...
- Ericson2314 10y agoNot a literal replacement, but no they want you to use PowerShell instead of CMD (and for good reason).
- mtdewcmu 10y agoI get that they want to push PowerShell.
- throwaway7645 10y agoI've been using Powershell a lot lately. I keep hoping I'll get the hang of it, but everything sucks. It gives you Compare-Object, but what it returns is an object. Even if I waste 10 minutes converting it to text and want to then split the strings it returns there is a 99% chance it won't work. Sure it is great for automating a few IT things like installing new users, but the problem is it shouldn't be that hard. In bash I would just pipe the output of diff to Awk and simply split on "," and tell it to print what I want. I'm sure it is possible in Powershell, but the 6 ways I tried never worked.
- sixothree 10y agoSame here. Every time I've completed a script I can't help but think I could have finished it so much faster in C# or just about any other language. I tried liking it. Maybe I'm just not finding the right useful examples.
- romwell 10y agoI also like that a system touted for comprehensibility and discoverability has the following very commonly used command: Get-ChildItem Guess what it does by looking at its name. Correct, it lists the contents of a directory! What else could it be? Conversely, if you want to find out what "dir"/"ls" would be in PowerShell, where else would you be looking! I like the idea of PowerShell a lot (object-oriented piping), but I hope it evolves into something with saner default aliases and better documentation, with easy things accomplished easily.
- RandomOpinion 10y agoFrom a basic data structures class in college, one might recall that nodes in a tree have can have child nodes. Filesystems, most of them anyway, are structured as trees of files and directories. Therefore one would expect a command named "Get-ChildItem" executed against the current directory to do...? (Aside from that, the Powershell default alias set translates both "dir" and "ls" to Get-ChildItem.)
- yomritoyj 10y agoGet-ChildItem also works on things other than directories. And Powershell understands both ls and dir!
- throwaway7645 10y agoIt knows ls, but there are a lot of UNIX commands it doesn't and it isn't a true implementation, but an alias for running Get-Childitem.
- ygra 10y ago
- banana_giraffe 10y agoThe article mentions that. Every change, no matter how trivial, in cmd breaks some behavior that someone is depending on, or at least it feels that way. Even fixing bugs tends to break large number of scripts in the wild. I'd like to see a 'bacmd' or something where they could break some history without fear, but clearly MS has decided to focus their resources on a very different way of thinking for their new shell.
- maxxxxx 10y agoYes, just freeze the old version and create a new CMD. And while they are at it, make notepad useful.
- mtdewcmu 10y agoI can understand why notepad is simple. You can easily install alternatives, like notepad++.
- roywiggins 10y agoDoes Notepad understand Unix line endings yet?