Beanshell has the same relationship to Java objects as MS Powershell does to .net objects - i.e. it provides an interactive, scripted environment for interacting with arbitrary Java objects.

It would surely be possible, by writing the necessary libraries, and perhaps extending the scripting language capabilities of Beanshell, to create a very similar utility to Powershell - one of the key features would be a Java library that abstracts the key concepts, datastructures and APIs fo the operating system, supporting, for example, process control.

It would have the benefit of providing a familiar, object oriented interface to support a wide variety of platform administration tasks, and some of the same benefits of Powershell - that is, scripts that process collections of objects rather than character streams, which in many cases simplifies then greatly, and obviates the need for a lot of complex text processing.

Has anyone else considered this?

Dickon