wish(1) Tk Applications wish(1)

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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.
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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
#!/usr/local/bin/wish
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

Tk 8.0 wish(1)