Re: [Cocoadialog-users] Bourne Shell Script Equivalent to Perl Script Sample for CocoaDialog Dropdown

[Bill L. <wl...@sw...>]

Thomas Patko <tp...@gm...> said:

> Thanks Bill.  That worked a treat.  The final code that I used to accomplish
> this portion of the coding is shown below (in case it is useful to anyone
> else).  In the recursion, I execute a command using the transient variable
> $INPUT each time.  Builds and runs fine together with Platypus.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Thomas
> 
> CD="CocoaDialog.app/Contents/MacOS/CocoaDialog"
> rv=`$1/Contents/Resources/$CD fileselect \
> --title "Select your Fireflly Input Files for Batch Job Submission" \
> --text "Select your Fireflly Input Files for Batch Job Submission"
> --select-multiple --no-newline`
> 
>  if [ -n "$rv" ]; then
>        # determine number of items returned
>        NO_ITEMS=`echo -n "$rv" | wc -l`
>        NO_ITEMS=`expr $NO_ITEMS + 1`
>        echo "The number of files selected is $NO_ITEMS"
>        COUNT=0
>        echo -n "$rv" | while [[ $COUNT -lt $NO_ITEMS ]]; do
>            read FILE
>            INPUT="$FILE"
>            echo "Running input file $INPUT"
>            COUNT=`expr $COUNT + 1`
>        done
>  else
>     echo "No Input file selected.  Application aborted."
>     sleep 6
>     exit 1
>  fi

I think that you have a problem and aren't aware of it!

You are using:

    NO_ITEMS=`echo -n "$rv" | wc -l`

Even if "$rv" is a multiline string (it contains one or more new-line 
characters), when you use "echo" without the "-e" option everything will come 
out on a single line!  Now, since you have included the "-n" option, this 
even supresses the final new-line character.

Playing around a little, 'echo -n "ANYTHING" | wc -l' always 
returns "0".  "wc -l" seems to count the number of new-line characters since 
without the "-e" option to display the additional new-line characters, they 
are ignored and you have even supressed the final new line character.

Running (the "\n" character is the new-line character):

    echo "line1\nline2\nline3" | wc -l

returns "1", just a single line.  Running:

    echo -e "line1\nline2\nline3" | wc -l

returns "3", the three lines that you would expect.  But running:

    echo -n "line1\nline2\nline3" | wc -l

returns a big fat "0"!  I don't think that this is what you want.  I really 
think that you want to use:

    NO_ITEMS=`echo -e "$rv" | wc -l`

If you use this instead you can ignore the next line with "expr" since the 
line count includes the final line yielding the expected number.  I am 
guessing that you never selected more than one file in the "fileselect" 
dialog.

By the way, everyone is always learning.  I have never used the '-e' option 
to echo until Mark used it in his example, which caused me to look it up.  I 
have been writing shell scripts for a long time!  Thanks Mark for teaching me 
something new and useful.  

But what I heard is the '-e' option doesn't appear to always be portable 
among various shell interpreters.  It may work on one system and not on 
another, so buyer beware and user be careful!

Bill Larson