wish

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z _

wish(1) Tk Applications wish(1)

_____________________________________________________________________________

NAME
wish - Simple windowing shell

SYNOPSIS
wish ?fileName arg arg ...?

OPTIONS
-colormap new Specifies that the window should have a new pri-
vate colormap instead of using the default col-
ormap 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 win-
dow, and as the name of the interpreter for send
commands.

-sync 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.

-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).

-visual visual 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 com-
mands. If wish is invoked with no arguments, or with a first argument
that starts with ‘‘-’’, then it reads Tcl commands interactively from
standard input. It will continue processing commands until all win-
dows 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 wish is invoked with an initial fileName argument, 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 com-
mand line, but the script file can always source it if desired.

OPTIONS
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; other-
wise it is taken from fileName, if it is specified, or from the com-
mand 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 spec-
ifying 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 arguments (0 if
none), not including the options described above.

argv Contains a Tcl list whose elements are the arg argu-
ments that follow a -- option or don’t 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. Otherwise, con-
tains 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 variable 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’s installed somewhere
else then you’ll 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 follow-
ing three lines:
#!/bin/sh
# the next line restarts using wish \
exec wish "$0" "$@"
This approach has three advantages over the approach in the previous
paragraph. First, the location of the wish binary doesn’t 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 com-
mand 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 out-
putting 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 isn’t yet complete; if tcl_prompt2 isn’t set
then no prompt is output for incomplete commands.

KEYWORDS
shell, toolkit

Tk 8.0 wish(1)