Most shells (such as Windows CMD.EXE and the UNIX shells SH, KSH, CSH, and BASH) operate by executing a command or utility in a new process, and presenting the results (or errors) to the user as text. Text-based processing is the way in which system interaction is done with these shells. Over the years, a large number of text processing utilities—such as sed, AWK, and PERL—have evolved to support this interaction. The heritage of this operational process is very rich.

MSH is very different from these traditional shells. First, this shell does not use text as the basis for interaction with the system, but uses an object model based on the .NET platform. Second, the list of built-in commands is much larger; this is done to ensure that the interaction with the object model is accomplished with the highest regard to integrity with respect to interacting with the system. Third, the shell provides consistency with regard to interacting with built-in commands through the use of a single parser, rather than relying on each command to create its own parser for parameters.

This document constrasts the Korn Shell (KSH) and MSH by providing a number of examples of each.