SuperCard Shell Essentials

Extending SuperCard with OS X Shell Commands

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Essential SuperCard functions

SuperCard Shell function

Execute shell commands

SuperCard Merge function

Variable & quote insertion.

A Quick look

OS X ships chock full of preinstalled shell commands capable of a wide variety of tasks.

Some are single purpose utilities akin to the Xfcns/Xcmds we're all accustomed to.

The screencapure command captures the screen, window, or any portion thereof, to clipboard (or file) returning nothing.

Capture portion of screen (interactive, to clipboard)
on mouseup
put shell("screencapture -ic ;") into junk
end mouseup

Others are powerful languages with hundreds of individual commands and functions.

Fortunately, one needn't learn all of such languages to take advantage.

The example below uses a Perl function to tidy-up output.

Return GMT formatted to HTTP specification
function gmtime
return shell("date -u +'%a, %e %b %Y %T %Z' | perl -pe chomp ;")
end gmtime

A linefeed is usually appended to text output, which in-turn is converted automatically to a carriage return by the SuperCard shell function (unless the extended function syntax is used)

The Perl function 'chomp' deletes linefeeds from output.

Recent Additions

Directory & File Lists

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Reference

Shell Scripting reference at Apple

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