tclsh(1) Tcl Applications tclsh(1)

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NAME

tclsh - Simple shell containing Tcl interpreter

SYNOPSIS

tclsh ?-encoding name? ?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, interactive 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 few arguments
specify the name of a script file, and, optionally, the encoding of
the text data stored in that script file. 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 automatic evaluation 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 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 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 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" ${1+"$@"}

This approach has three advantages over the approach in the previous
paragraph. First, the location of the tclsh 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
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 practice 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 global Tcl variables in addition to those
created by the Tcl library itself (such as env, which maps
environment variables such as PATH into Tcl):

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 global
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 is not yet complete; if
tcl_prompt2 is not set then no prompt is output for incomplete
commands.

STANDARD CHANNELS

See Tcl_StandardChannels for more explanations.

SEE ALSO

auto_path(n), encoding(n), env(n), fconfigure(n)

KEYWORDS

application, argument, interpreter, prompt, script file, shell

Tcl tclsh(1)