Tcl Applications tclsh(1)
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NAME
tclsh - Simple shell containing Tcl interpreter
SYNOPSIS
tclsh ?fileName arg arg ...?
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DESCRIPTION
Tclsh is a shell-like application that reads Tcl commands
from its standard input or from a file and evaluates them. If invoked with no arguments then it runs interactively,reading Tcl commands from standard input and printing com-
mand results and error messages to standard output. It runsuntil the exit command is invoked or until it reaches end-
of-file on its standard input. If there exists a file
.tclshrc (or tclshrc.tcl on the Windows platforms) in the
home directory of the user, tclsh evaluates the file as a
Tcl script just before reading the first command from stan-
dard input. SCRIPT FILESIf tclsh is invoked with arguments then the first argument
is the name of a script file and any additional arguments are made available to the script as variables (see below).Instead of reading commands from standard input tclsh will
read Tcl commands from the named file; tclsh will exit when
it reaches the end of the file. The end of the file may be | marked either by the physical end of the medium, or by the |character, '\032' ('\u001a', control-Z). If this character |
is present in the file, the tclsh application will read text |
up to but not including the character. An application that | requires this character in the file may safely encode it as | ``\032'', ``\x1a'', or ``\u001a''; or may generate it by use | of commands such as format or binary. There is no automaticevaluation of .tclshrc when the name of a script file is
presented on the tclsh command line, but the script file can
always source it if desired. If you create a Tcl script in a file whose first line is#!/usr/local/bin/tclsh
then you can invoke the script file directly from your shellif you mark the file as executable. This assumes that tclsh
has been installed in the default location in /usr/local/bin; if it's installed somewhere else then you'll have to modify the above line to match. Many UNIXsystems do not allow the #! line to exceed about 30 charac-
ters in length, so be sure that the tclsh executable can be
accessed with a short file name. Tcl Last change: 1Tcl Applications tclsh(1)
An even better approach is to start your script files with the following three lines:#!/bin/sh
# the next line restarts using tclsh \
exec tclsh "$0" "$@"
This approach has three advantages over the approach in theprevious paragraph. First, the location of the tclsh binary
doesn't have to be hard-wired into the script: it can be
anywhere in your shell search path. Second, it gets aroundthe 30-character file name limit in the previous approach.
Third, this approach will work even if tclsh is itself a
shell script (this is done on some systems in order to han-
dle multiple architectures or operating systems: the tclsh
script selects one of several binaries to run). The threelines cause both sh and tclsh to process the script, but the
exec is only executed by sh. sh processes the script first; it treats the second line as a comment and executes thethird line. The exec statement cause the shell to stop pro-
cessing and instead to start up tclsh to reprocess the
entire script. When tclsh starts up, it treats all three
lines as comments, since the backslash at the end of the second line causes the third line to be treated as part of the comment on the second line. You should note that it is also common practise to install |tclsh with its version number as part of the name. This has |
the advantage of allowing multiple versions of Tcl to exist | on the same system at once, but also the disadvantage of | making it harder to write scripts that start up uniformly | across different versions of Tcl. VARIABLES Tclsh sets the following Tcl variables:argc Contains a count of the number of arg argu-
ments (0 if none), not including the name of the script file. argv Contains a Tcl list whose elements are the arg arguments, in order, or an empty string if there are no arg arguments.argv0 Contains fileName if it was specified. Oth-
erwise, contains the name by which tclsh was
invoked.tcl_interactive
Contains 1 if tclsh is running interactively
(no fileName was specified and standard inputis a terminal-like device), 0 otherwise.
Tcl Last change: 2Tcl Applications tclsh(1)
PROMPTSWhen tclsh is invoked interactively it normally prompts for
each command with ``% ''. You can change the prompt by set-
ting the variables tcl_prompt1 and tcl_prompt2. If variable
tcl_prompt1 exists then it must consist of a Tcl script to
output a prompt; instead of outputting a prompt tclsh will
evaluate the script in tcl_prompt1. The variable
tcl_prompt2 is used in a similar way when a newline is typed
but the current command isn't yet complete; if tcl_prompt2
isn't set then no prompt is output for incomplete commands. STANDARD CHANNELSSee Tcl_StandardChannels for more explanations.
SEE ALSO
fconfigure(1T), tclvars(1T) KEYWORDS argument, interpreter, prompt, script file, shellATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri-
butes:_______________________________________
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE|
|____________________|__________________|_
| Availability | runtime/tcl-8 |
|____________________|__________________|_
| Interface Stability| Uncommitted ||____________________|_________________|
NOTES Source for Tcl is available on http://opensolaris.org. Tcl Last change: 3