(steveh) 02/21/93

The NT Shell - ntsh.exe (say: 'Nietzsche')

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OBJECTIVE:

    To ease the burden of going from a cryptic, money losing
    operating system that we have loved since college to a
    cryptic, money-making operating system that we have hated
    since college. Please note the money-making part.

    ntsh.exe, as it exists right now is is little more than a
    command interpreter. You will quickly find some missing
    pieces such as filename expansion and pipes, but i think
    you will like it more than cmd.exe. Garage software is
    meant to be living, growing software and I would like to
    see ntsh mature into a robust win32 application.


REALITIES:

    I wrote ntsh last weekend and it is not finished. If I get
    enough positive response, I will try add at lease one major
    feature or utility a week. If you encounter troubles with
    ntsh or any related utilities, try to work through them or
    drop me an e-mail note if you can't figure it out. Just keep
    one thing in mind whenever you are using my programs:

        "The price is right".


DOES:

    + ls.exe --
        dir is a cmd.exe builtin which does'nt do us much
        good for ntsh. this was my first attempt at win32 routines
        and is very rough (try passing it the -l option to see
        what i mean).

        Unfortunatly, cmd.exe has alot of builtin commands that
        make replacing it a much larger job than it seems. These
        utilities are easy to write and I can keep posting them
        if I get any response.


    + '$' variables --
        Ntsh will evaluate dollar values given on the command line.
        It also supports the standard shell builtins such as
        echo, export and set. Please note that ntsh will follow
        a bourne/korn shell function set, variable assignments
        will be in the following conventions:

            blah="this is cool!"
            export blah

        will export 'blah' with the value "this is cool!". sorry
        csh users.

        NOTE: Ntsh is case sensitive, you may recieve some wierness
        regarding this (on my machine, PATH is really Path; i don't
        know why).

    + Navigation:
        Ntsh will accept forward slashes as directory tokens. Ntsh
        will also evaluate any drive letters you pass it on the
        fly while changing the directory. October beta NT cmd.exe
        will not allow this. Ntsh will also accept brain-dammaged
        keys (back slashes) in directory specifications:

            cd d:\users/default\work/lib


TODO's:

    - Statement -- follow Korn shell guidelines closely.

    + File and directory wildcard expansion.
    + Fix ls (mainly interested in permission settings??).
    + Write chmod (should be a easy once I figured out ls).
    + Multiple command support (leading into shell scripting).
    + Add redirection and pipes.
    + Ability to read/execute shell scripts.
    + Finish cp (almost made it out for this rel. found major bug).
    + Mkdir/rmdir programs.
    + Pwd.
    + The rest of the stuff I forgot.

If I am missing anything, or my priorities are off please drop
me a note at ...!uunet!4gen!steveh. Please report any non-obvious
bugs and let me know what you think. I am going to be doing this
stuff anyway and people are finding it valuable; i might as well
give it away.

I'll do the shell, someone else do vi...


Steven T. Henderson