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

[Thomas P. <tp...@gm...>]

Hello Bill:

I will actually double check things, but the script does work normally at
least when built with Platypus (tested it with about 20 file selected and it
returned the values OK).  It should note that I used the --no-newline option
when calling CocoaDialog (see below)

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`

This may not be the cleanest way to do it but it works.  I suspect that as
the number of files selected gets larger and the returned string gets longer
without a newline as the delimiter between input file strings my script may
break.  I will read your notes and put together some cleaner code.

Thanks again.

--Thomas

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 10:08 AM, Bill Larson <wl...@sw...> wrote:

> 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
>