Dave Baldwin
9/7/2006 4:38:00 PM
On 7 Sep 2006, at 16:55, Shane Emmons wrote:
> Does anyone know of an alternative to WScript.Shell that works for
> Mac OS X?
> For anyone who doesn't know, this allows you to send key strokes
> (among
> other things) to other programs without having the other program
> explicitly
> written to accept such input. Here is an example script using
> WScript.Shell
>
> -----[code]-----
>
> require "win32ole"
>
> shell = WIN32OLE.new("WScript.Shell")
> shell.AppActivate("Command Prompt")
> shell.SendKeys("cls{ENTER}")
> shell.SendKeys("dir{ENTER}")
> shell.SendKeys("echo Hello, World!{ENTER}")
>
> -----[/code]-----
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> --
> --- Shane Emmons <semmons99@gmail.com>
There are a number of things you need to do:
1. Open System Preferences and check Enable Access for Assistive
Devices in the Universal Access preference pane. This allows you to
send keystrokes (and any GUI related input) to apps not written to
accept them.
2. Send the keystrokes by using applescript or some other osascript
language. RubyCocoa can provide this osascripting bridge with Ruby,
but I have no experience of this.
3. Using applescript :-( this will give you an idea (over half the
lines are error handling):
on run argv
activate application "Preview"
tell application "System Events"
get system attribute "sysv" -- argv
if result is greater than or equal to 4144 then -- Mac OS X 10.3.0
if UI elements enabled then
tell application process "Preview"
-- GUI Scripting statements:
keystroke "f" using {command down}
set search_string to item 1 of argv
keystroke search_string
end tell
else
beep
display dialog "GUI Scripting is not enabled" & return & return &
"Open System Preferences and check Enable Access for Assistive
Devices in the Universal Access preference pane, then run this script
again." with icon stop
if button returned of result is "OK" then
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
end tell
end if
end if
else
beep
display dialog "This computer cannot run this script" & return &
return & "The script uses GUI Scripting technology, which requires an
upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or newer." with icon caution buttons
{"Quit"} default button "Quit"
end if
end tell
end run
but the key lines are the GUI scripting statements.
This example will open the Preview app and do a search for some text
supplied on the command line. (Preview lacks any real applescript
support). This script is then run with the command line:
osascript path_to_script word_to_search_for
While this isn't quite what you want it should give you a head start
or some ideas.
Dave.