[Microsoft] has developed a more robust command line interface ([CLI]) for Windows XP and [Windows Vista] called Windows PowerShell that is supposed to bring to Windows a Unix style command line. It can be downloaded and installed for free from this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx

[snichols] I tried it and it's much better then DOS, but comes with many brand new commands, so there's a learning curve involved. There are some commands that will look familiar ported from Unix, like diff and ls. You can do math operations right within the shell and call other programs like [BASH] or DOS does. Has anyone else tried and what did you think?

[LV] So, what's the connection to Tcl?

[snichols] They're both interpreted languages. Yet another choice for a programmer when they need to script something, but PowerShell's use would only be for Windows oriented tasks. Bash runs on multiple platforms like Linux, Unix, Mac, etc, and PowerShell is unique to Windows, but still much more robust then the predecessor DOS.

[LV] Microsoft purchased [Interix] who makes a [POSIX] Windows kernel that
provides quite a useful command line environment that includes ksh,
perl, tcl and other pieces. It was called Microsoft Windows Services
for UNIX (SFU).  See details at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Services_for_UNIX . Note
that while it is available for free download for Windows XP, a number
of its components come in Windows Server 2003 R2 and Vista. I don't
know how one completes those environments.

----

[MHo]: It should be noted that the PowerShell CLI requires the .NET-Environment. IMHO this is a little overweight for a command line interface. And why is MS constantly busy in reinventing the wheel? There are already enough CLIs on this world, like BASH (oder TCLSH ;-), which are already documented, available nearly everywhere and well known. We all remember, a few years ago, MS claimed VBScript to be ''the definitve scripting environment''. And so it goes on and on and on and on...

----
[esfour] That's because Windows broken by design all-is-binary concept is not compatible with the usual shell mechanisms.
Well, the csh-like syntax of the Windows PowerShell is appalling, but at least one is able to retrieve data from a windows object and convert it to the users preferred format. I'm still not sure if WPS is the answer (and I cannot remember if I ever asked the question), but it's way better than VBS. 

----

[sdw] All that being said... if I get some time I'd love to hack a Tcl extension to expose the functions inside of PowerShell to a Tcl script. My organization has swallowed the Kool-Aid and I'm maintaining exchange boxen. While I can get around pretty well in PowerShell, what I'd really love to do is tie it in to the mass of scripts that I've already put together for managing Unix. Not to mention a trained chimp interface for handing to HR types so they can create and remove users without having to play around in Active Directory themselves.

----
!!!!!!
%| [Category Windows] |%
!!!!!!