Re: To shell or not to shell (was Re: URL Access Redux)
Re: To shell or not to shell (was Re: URL Access Redux)
- Subject: Re: To shell or not to shell (was Re: URL Access Redux)
- From: Malcolm Fitzgerald <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 13:42:05 +1000
On 23/05/2006, at 10:55 AM, Stockly, Ed wrote:
If there's a proclamation that it's not appropriate for this list,
or if a specific poster says it's not what they want I'll accept
that, but having this debate with third-parties each time it comes
up seems counterproductive.
OK, I think I complain about this more than anyone else because I'm
concerned that this list is becoming more and more a list for shell
scripters than for AppleScripters and that makes this list less and
less hospitable to AppleScripters, especially new AppleScripters.
This list was started because the MacScripter's list became more of a
Frontier list than anything else and you couldn't ask a simple
AppleScript question without getting a flood of Usertalk solutions
that would drown out the AppleScript answers the user was looking for.
The same thing is happening now. It's as if this list has been
hijacked by shell scripting and the humble AppleScripter is barely
being supported anymore. And the new AppleScripter, who's drawn to the
technology by the English like syntax and the beauty of the
AppleScript language and the robust interapplication technology, is
bombarded by this shell scripting gibberish (at least that's what a
typical shell script looks like to a typical Mac user) and nearly
always pointed away from AppleScript and towards shell scripting.
That's a good point Ed and well made.
The particular instance that started this discussion was when I
recommended cURL to the OP who was trying to script URL Access. In
those circumstances I'd do it all again because the OP may not know
that URL Access scripting is flaky and bound for failure. The OP may
not know that there is a very good tool provided on the shell which is
excellent and easy to use.
My intention was to give the OP the benefit of my experience of working
with URL Access Scripting and to point the way to a robust alternative.
The OP may then discover that they want to write AppleScript, no matter
how great cURL is. Then they may want to build an AppleScript library
which would allow them to send messages to cURL via AppleScript in an
english-like syntax. Then they could ask here and I'm sure they'd get
lots of help because that strikes me as the sort of challenge that the
AS-list loves.
I can see shell scripting questions cropping up here all the time
because they can provide potential solutions to tasks in an
AppleScripted work-flow.
malcolm
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