Re: osascript
Re: osascript
- Subject: Re: osascript
- From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 20:06:45 -0700
On Thursday, July 25, 2002, at 12:17 PM, Simon Forster wrote:
Can anyone tell me why the shell script snippet:
#!/bin/sh
osascript -e 'tell application "'$1'" to activate'
fails when passed a two word argument from the command line but works
fine with a one word argument. I've tried echoing it back to the
terminal and it all looks absolutely fine such as:
osascript -e tell application "TextEdit" to activate
and
osascript -e tell application "Address Book" to activate
are echoed back. If I try too run it, the first version works fine, the
second doesn't - it fails with "syntax error: Expected string but found
end of script. (-2741)".
Ah, the wonders of shell quoting. "echo" is a surprisingly bad way to
test that you've got it right, because it just puts a space between each
argument, and if the problem is that you've got two arguments where you
wanted one with a space in it, you can't tell the difference.
The problem is that the $1 occurs outside of any quotes, so if it's got
a space in it, you wind up with these arguments:
0: osascript
1: -e
2: tell application "Address
3: Book" to activate
...so the source passed to AppleScript is just 'tell application
"Address', which of course doesn't compile. (osascript should warn you
about this sort of thing, but the logic is a bit off.)
To fix it, you need to quote the argument. There are a couple of ways
to go about it; either of these works:
osascript -e 'tell application "'"$1"'" to activate'
osascript -e "tell application \"$1\" to activate"
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
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| References: | |
| | >osascript (From: Simon Forster <email@hidden>) |