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  4. wish(1)

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wish(1) Tk Applications wish(1) 





NAME


wish - Simple windowing shell






SYNOPSIS


wish ?-encoding name? ?fileName arg arg
    ...?






OPTIONS



  

  
Specifies the encoding of the text stored in fileName. This option
      is only recognized prior to the fileName argument.

  

  
Specifies that the window should have a new private colormap instead of
      using the default colormap for the screen.

  

  
Display (and screen) on which to display window.

  

  
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.

  

  
Use name as the title to be displayed in the window, and as the
      name of the interpreter for send commands.

  

  
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.

  

  
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.



  

  
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.
    
    

    

  








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:



  

  
Contains a count of the number of arg arguments (0 if none), not
      including the options described above.

  

  
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.

  

  
Contains fileName if it was specified. Otherwise, contains the name
      by which wish was invoked.

  

  
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.

  

  
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







  

    8.0
    Tk