wish(1tk)
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 argu- |
ment.
-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 synchro-
nously, 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 -con-
tainer option enabled.
-visual visual Specifies the visual to use for the win-
dow. Visual may have any of the forms
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wish(1) Tk Applications wish(1)
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 com-
mands 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 addition-
ally 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.
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wish(1) Tk Applications wish(1)
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 argu-
ments (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. Oth-
erwise, 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 vari-
able 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
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wish(1) Tk Applications wish(1)
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 han-
dle 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 pro-
cessing 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 physi-
cal 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 for-
mat or binary.
PROMPTS
When wish is invoked interactively it normally prompts for
each command with "% ". You can change the prompt by set-
ting 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.
KEYWORDS
shell, toolkit
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