I’m sure you’ve noticed by now. One of the things you end up doing a lot in shells and scripting languages is parsing text. We’ve done it many times in articles on this blog. We’ve seen it in many articles on other blogs. We’ve all sat in quiet reverence of the wondrous power that is Regular Expressions.
And you want to be part of the Regex Illuminati.
Eric has just started a series of exercises on Learning Regular Expresions. In his words, this is
Since the first Channel 9 interviews were so popular, Jeffrey recently gave another interview on Channel 9. With the intentions of talking about the PDC and the CLR, he ended up talking about nearly everything :)
Check it out! http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=127819
Last time, we wrote code to refresh our description data while we navigate the file system. We hadn’t yet integrated it to our directory listings, so let’s do that now.
Our final step is to customize the formatting information that Monad uses to output a directory listing. This is a fairly small change that mimics the way we output the “LastWriteTime” column.
First, open “FileSystem.format.mshxml” from your Monad installation directory. This file tells Monad how convert the raw .Net File System objects into a form more suitable for humans. The tweaking we are about to do illustrates one of the fundamental powers of Monad. Data in the pipeline retains its full object-oriented fidelity until it reaches your screen. This final stage of the pipeline is called “Formatting and Output.”
Last time, we wrote code to parse DESCRIPT.ION files – and entertained the whole family while we were at it. This was a manual step, though, so we need to figure out how to make it happen as we use the shell.
In order for this feature to be of any use, we need to ensure that the descriptions hashtable is updated before the directory output hits the screen. Our primary choices are:
In the BBS (Bulletin Board Service) days, one of the common past times was to connect to a board and browse long file listings in search of neat things to download. When the names of files were restricted to 11 characters (8.3,) you didn’t have much to go by. BBS software soon came up with a meta-file, called “descript.ion,” which mapped file names to longer, more verbose descriptions. During a file listing, the BBS software read this file and displayed these detailed descriptions inline. Fastidious SysOps (Sytem Operators, of which I was proudly one for many years) spent long hours painstakingly describing files for the benefit of both themselves, and their users.
I mentioned to many of you during the PDC that we’d be working hard to make our printed hands-on labs available for download. As Adam points out, get ‘em while they’re still hot!
We’ve even gone a bit further, and made the “Getting Started” guide and a few quick references available in the documentation pack, available via the Microsoft download center.
[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]
Although all of you are probably Monad junkies already, I thought I’d point out Thomas Lee’s very helpful Introduction to Monad article. Great stuff!
[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]
I’ve been watching Jeff’s progress on this shell for awhile, and he’s finally posted a download. jaMSH is an alternative to the default msh.exe that we ship, and has some very promising features.
It uses the GNU Readline Library as its input mechanism, so you immediately get gobs and gobs and gobs of command-editing features. It’s also implemented a fairly rich tab-completion model (filenames, variables, members,) and offers a facility to load cmdlets and providers during startup. This ability to dynamically load cmdlets and providers is something that we had to remove from our default shell because of the versioning problems it introduces, but we’re introducing a stronger (and more usable model) in the next drop or two.
Today, Pubsub brought me Jeff’s post, “In Defense of Verbosity.” In it, he talks about (and praises) the fine expressive balance that Monad allows you to walk between terseness, and verbosity.
In an interactive session (where you care only about the output,) terseness is your friend. Take, for example, the following command that finds the 10 most referenced DLLs in running processes:
gps | select id -exp modules | group filename | sort count -des | select -f 10
Do you use Monad? Do you want to be ever-present in the corridors that we walk down every day? Here’s your chance!
Send a photo of you, your team, your company logo, or even your favourite Monad screenshot to &{ “[email protected]” -replace “AOEU”,"" }, and I’ll post it(*) on our “Shrine of the Customer” bulletin board.
(*) I do, of course, reserve the right to not post pictures that would get me fired.
