I haven’t had a lot of time to look into some of the latest MS tech what with the project I’ve been mired in for a while, and yesterday Hanselman turned me on to Monad, the new Microsoft command shell. (Yeah, I’m a little late for this boat, but it’s still in beta, so I’m not that late.) He was showing me some of the ways he’s thinking about automating tasks around work and I gotta say… even the simplest demo is awesome and makes you think in a different way entirely about the usefulness of the command line. Everything is an object? No more parsing text output? It doesn’t get much better than that.

I decided to try it out this morning when I was talking to Stu and he wanted to figure out the most recently modified file in a directory tree. Monad to the rescue, right? One command line:

get-childitem -Recurse -Exclude CVS | sort-object -Property LastWriteTime -Descending | select-object -First 5 | get-property -Property LastWriteTime,FullName | format-table -Property LastWriteTime,FullName -Autosize

That will:

• Recurse through the filesystem from the current location down
• Sort all the files found by last write time
• Get the first five in that list (the most recent five modified files)
• Get the last write time and full name properties, and
• Format the property list into a nice table

It ends up looking like this (click to enlarge):

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I don’t know about you, but I think that’s hot. One line, loads of functionality. I mean, who needs batch scripting now? I can’t wait to get some time to really delve into this thing.