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 command results and error messages to
standard output. It runs until 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 standard input.
SCRIPT FILES
If 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. There is no automatic
evaluation of .tclshrc in this case, 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 shell if 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 UNIX systems do not allow the #! line to exceed about 30
characters in length, so be sure that the tclsh 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 tclsh \
exec tclsh "$0" "$@"
This approach has three advantages over the approach in the previous
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 around the 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 handle
multiple architectures or operating systems: the tclsh script selects
one of several binaries to run). The three lines 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 the third line. The exec statement cause the shell to stop
processing 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 arguments (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. Otherwise,
contains the name by which tclsh was invoked.
tcl_interactive
Contains 1 if tclsh is running interactively (no
fileName was specified and standard input is a terminal-
like device), 0 otherwise.
PROMPTS
When tclsh 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 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.
KEYWORDS
argument, interpreter, prompt, script file, shell