After seeing a comment from Vaibav (I guess he might be related to Monad team), thought of doing some experiment with the command line help of the commands before we get any document on this from the team.
First lets look into the the following two screen shots:
You can observe that, the command “mkdir /help” raises an error in old command line where as it creates a directory called ‘help’ in the new one. And re entering the same command in the new sheel raises a nice error saying directory already exists as shown below:
MSH C:\> mkdir /help
new-item : Item with specified name C:\help already exists.
At E:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\msh\profile.msh:53 char:1
+ new-item <<<< -type directory -path $args
I wasn’t sure what the line new-item <<<< -type directory -path $args means (may be debug info ?).
In the similar lines “mkdir –help” also created a directory called “–help” which is similar to the old command shell behaviour. But the old one does remove the directory –help with a simple command like rmdir –help where as new one does not and one has to double quote the name as shown below:
MSH C:\> mkdir --help<br /><br /><br /> Directory: FileSystem::C:\<br /><br /><br />Mode LastWriteTime Length Name<br />---- ------------- ------ ----<br />d---- 9/15/2005 10:32 AM --help<br /><br /><br />MSH C:\> mkdir --help<br />new-item : Item with specified name C:\--help already exists.<br />At E:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\msh\profile.msh:53 char:13<br />+ new-item <<<< -type directory -path $args<br />MSH C:\> rmdir --help<br />remove-item : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter '-help'.<br />At line:1 char:12<br />+ rmdir --help <<<<<br />MSH C:\> rmdir "--help"<br />MSH C:\>So, wondering how the backward compatibility will work if we have any batch scripts written based on this even though its not a good practice to have weired characters in file or directory names. Anyway, we will experiment more once the Monad team publishes any help on the new shell and stay tuned for the updates