Basic AppleScript w/Terminal Question

salgala2000 · Mar 13, 2012

Hello,
I'm new to applescript and need help. I've read that using

PHP:

do shell script "command here"

will run a command in terminal for you. My question is: how do you retrieve the output of that command and store it as a variable?:Blushing:

Mark FX · Mar 14, 2012

You simply set the variable to the do shell script command like this.

Code:

set myApplications to do shell script "ls /Applications/"

By default the returned myApplications variable result is a Applescript text type, as UTF-8 format, but you can use different types like this.

Code:

set theBinaryData to do shell script ("curl " & quoted form of theURLvariable) as data

this will return binarydata.

If you dont have Administrator privileges, you can use a command like this.

Code:

set myApplications to do shell script "ls /Applications/" with administrator privileges ¬
      user name "adminName" password "adminPassword"

To find out all of the options for the do shell script command, look in the
StandardAdditions.sdef file, from the Window / Library menu.

Also you can script the Terminal Application like this.

Code:

tell application "Terminal"
        activate
        do script "ls /Applications/"
end tell

In all of the above examples, you can also use echo and pipes in your shell commands.

Hope this is of some help

Regards Mark

Basic AppleScript w/Terminal Question

salgala2000

Mark FX

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