Re: Scripting Mail.app on 10.3.2?

[John Delacour]

At 12:56 am +0000 17/1/04, I wrote:

 However the applet method is very fast.  I need to work out the 
semaphore bit because the Finder is too slow to update and you can't 
rely on modification times.
I have now got the backgrounded applet and the perl subroutine 
working predictably and consistently.  Using the script below

tell app "Eudora"
        get whole text of front message
end
I am getting results of 0.66 seconds consistently.  In case anyone's 
interested I print the routine below with apologies for my bad perl. 
The stay-open applet, whose script I omit here, gets the open command 
from the shell and reads the AS script from $fin.  It then does 'run 
script _script', that is it compiles and runs the script,  and writes 
the output to $fout and "OK" to $semaphore.  DOAS loops until 
$semaphore gives the OK and then reads $fout and prints the output.

use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw( gettimeofday );
my $as = <<_______AS;
--quit
tell app "Eudora"
        get whole text of front message
end
_______AS
my $start     = gettimeofday;
my $result    = DOAS( $as, 3 );
$result =~ s~\r\n?~\n~g ;
my $timetaken = gettimeofday - $start;
print "$result\n\t$timetaken\n";
sub DOAS {
    my ( $changed, $fin, $fout, $semaphore, @stat, $t, $time, $timeout );
    $timeout = 5;

    my $tmp = "/tmp";
    ( $fin, $fout, $semaphore ) = split /\s/,
      "$tmp/pldfin $tmp/pldfout $tmp/pldsem";
    open FOUT, ">$fout";
    close FOUT;
    # Clear the semaphore file
    open F, ">$semaphore";
    close F;
    # Write the script to fin
    open FIN, ">$fin";
    print FIN $_[0];
    `open -a pld $fin`;
    # Don't bother to continue if the quit command was sent
    $_[0] =~ /^quit/i and return "pld quit at first word in \$as";
    # Wait for the semaphore file to signal "OK"
    $time    = time;
    $changed = 0;
    while ( $changed == 0 ) {
        $t = time;
        open F, $semaphore;
        <F> and $changed = 1;
        close F;
        if ( $t > ( $time + $timeout ) ) {
            print "Timed out after $timeout seconds.\n";
            exit;
        }
    }
    # All clear now to read the output
    open FOUT, $fout;
    $result = <FOUT> . $/;
}