NAME¶
wish - Simple windowing shell
SYNOPSIS¶
wish ?
-encoding name? ?
fileName arg arg ...?
OPTIONS¶
- -encoding name
- Specifies the encoding of the text stored in
fileName. This option is only recognized prior to the
fileName argument.
- -colormap new
- Specifies that the window should have a new private
colormap instead of using the default colormap for the screen.
- -display display
- Display (and screen) on which to display window.
- -geometry geometry
- Initial geometry to use for window. If this option is
specified, its value is stored in the geometry global variable of
the application's Tcl interpreter.
- -name name
- Use name as the title to be displayed in the window,
and as the name of the interpreter for send commands.
- -sync
- Execute all X server commands synchronously, so that errors
are reported immediately. This will result in much slower execution, but
it is useful for debugging.
- -use id
- Specifies that the main window for the application is to be
embedded in the window whose identifier is id, instead of being
created as an independent toplevel window. Id must be specified in
the same way as the value for the -use option for toplevel widgets
(i.e. it has a form like that returned by the winfo id
command).
Note that on some platforms this will only
work correctly if id refers to a Tk frame or toplevel
that has its -container option enabled.
- -visual visual
- Specifies the visual to use for the window. Visual
may have any of the forms supported by the Tk_GetVisual
procedure.
- --
- Pass all remaining arguments through to the script's
argv variable without interpreting them. This provides a mechanism
for passing arguments such as -name to a script instead of having
wish interpret them.
DESCRIPTION¶
Wish is a simple program consisting of the Tcl command language, the Tk
toolkit, and a main program that reads commands from standard input or from a
file. It creates a main window and then processes Tcl commands. If
wish
is invoked with arguments, then the first few arguments, ?
-encoding
name? ?
fileName? specify the name of a script file, and,
optionally, the encoding of the text data stored in that script file. A value
for
fileName is recognized if the appropriate argument does not start
with “-”.
If there are no arguments, or the arguments do not specify a
fileName,
then wish reads Tcl commands interactively from standard input. It will
continue processing commands until all windows have been deleted or until
end-of-file is reached on standard input. If there exists a file “
.wishrc” in the home directory of the user,
wish evaluates
the file as a Tcl script just before reading the first command from standard
input.
If arguments to
wish do specify a
fileName, then
fileName
is treated as the name of a script file.
Wish will evaluate the script
in
fileName (which presumably creates a user interface), then it will
respond to events until all windows have been deleted. Commands will not be
read from standard input. There is no automatic evaluation of “
.wishrc” when the name of a script file is presented on the
wish command line, but the script file can always
source it if
desired.
Note that on Windows, the
wishversion.exe program varies
from the
tclshversion.exe program in an additional
important way: it does not connect to a standard Windows console and is
instead a windowed program. Because of this, it additionally provides access
to its own
console command.
OPTION PROCESSING¶
Wish automatically processes all of the command-line options described in
the
OPTIONS summary above. Any other command-line arguments besides
these are passed through to the application using the
argc and
argv variables described later.
APPLICATION NAME AND CLASS¶
The name of the application, which is used for purposes such as
send
commands, is taken from the
-name option, if it is specified; otherwise
it is taken from
fileName, if it is specified, or from the command name
by which
wish was invoked. In the last two cases, if the name contains
a “/” character, then only the characters after the last slash are
used as the application name.
The class of the application, which is used for purposes such as specifying
options with a
RESOURCE_MANAGER property or .Xdefaults file, is the
same as its name except that the first letter is capitalized.
VARIABLES¶
Wish sets the following Tcl variables:
- argc
- Contains a count of the number of arg arguments (0
if none), not including the options described above.
- argv
- Contains a Tcl list whose elements are the arg
arguments that follow a -- option or do not match any of the
options described in OPTIONS above, in order, or an empty string if
there are no such arguments.
- argv0
- Contains fileName if it was specified. Otherwise,
contains the name by which wish was invoked.
- geometry
- If the -geometry option is specified, wish
copies its value into this variable. If the variable still exists after
fileName has been evaluated, wish uses the value of the
variable in a wm geometry command to set the main window's
geometry.
- tcl_interactive
- Contains 1 if wish is reading commands interactively
( fileName was not specified and standard input is a terminal-like
device), 0 otherwise.
SCRIPT FILES¶
If you create a Tcl script in a file whose first line is
then you can invoke the script file directly from your shell if you mark it as
executable. This assumes that
wish has been installed in the default
location in /usr/local/bin; if it is installed somewhere else then you will
have to modify the above line to match. Many UNIX systems do not allow the
#! line to exceed about 30 characters in length, so be sure that the
wish executable can be accessed with a short file name.
An even better approach is to start your script files with the following three
lines:
#!/bin/sh
# the next line restarts using wish \
exec wish "$0" "$@"
This approach has three advantages over the approach in the previous paragraph.
First, the location of the
wish binary does not have to be hard-wired
into the script: it can be anywhere in your shell search path. Second, it gets
around the 30-character file name limit in the previous approach. Third, this
approach will work even if
wish is itself a shell script (this is done
on some systems in order to handle multiple architectures or operating
systems: the
wish script selects one of several binaries to run). The
three lines cause both
sh and
wish 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 the third line. The
exec statement cause the shell to stop processing and instead to start
up
wish to reprocess the entire script. When
wish 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.
The end of a script 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
wish application will read
text up to but not including the character. An application that requires this
character in the file may encode it as “\032”, “\x1a”,
or “\u001a”; or may generate it by use of commands such as
format or
binary.
PROMPTS¶
When
wish is invoked interactively it normally prompts for each command
with “
% ”. You can change the prompt by setting 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
wish 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 is not yet complete; if
tcl_prompt2 is not set then no prompt is output for incomplete
commands.
KEYWORDS¶
shell, toolkit
