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" ${1+"$@"}
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.
SEE ALSO¶
tclsh(1), toplevel(n),
Tk_Main(3),
Tk_MainLoop(3),
Tk_MainWindow(3)
KEYWORDS¶
application, argument, interpreter, prompt, script file, shell, toolkit,
toplevel