running command-line programs from rev

[Dar Scott]

On Sunday, October 13, 2002, at 04:05 AM, David Vaughan wrote:

> Jan has jumped the gun slightly. You will have a problem if you are using 
> 1.1.1. Shell commands in OS X are not supported before 1.5A7. You should 
> be OK on this soon.

When I first got Revolution I wrote this to the list.  (That means tread 
carefully.)  It is a simple shell workaround and an example.  It has a few 
limitations but might work for ditto.  I welcome fixes.

> I know nothing about AppleScript, but with a tiny bit of fooling around I 
> came up with this:
>
> function shellSH cmd
>   -- Sorry, no quote marks in cmd in this version
>   -- And shellCommand is ignored
>   put "do shell script" & quote & cmd & quote into s
>   do s as AppleScript
>   put result() into r
>   replace numToChar(13) with linefeed in r
>   return r
> end shellSH
>
> This uses sh and not tcsh that the Terminal program uses.  There is 
> probably a way to do this with Terminal, but even those six lines of 
> AppleScript are beyond me until I get a reference.
>
> Here is one way to ping, then:
>
> function ping ip
>   return shellSH("/sbin/ping -c 1 " & ip) contains "1 packets received"
> end ping
>
> This takes over 10 seconds if the computer is not there.  It returns 
> virtually immediately if it is.  I tried -w, but it doesn't seem to work.

Dar Scott