In article [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Doug McNutt) wrote:
I just saw this on the AppleScript mailing list.
John is probably not a member of this list but I'll bet someone here can help
off list.
Isn't there a module available?
Yep. A few.
I've inherited a Perl script with a few routines invoking AS commands which,
being written a couple of years ago, expects to make the calls through
MacPerl. Needless to say, it breaks under OS X, but the client still wants
to use it.
As you'll soon figure out, my Perl is pretty much limited to spelling its
name correctly, so I may be up against something trivial, but does anyone
know how I can rewrite the MacPerl calls to run straight through the included
Perl under OS X? The operative sections all look like this:
{
MacPerl::DoAppleScript(END_SCRIPT);
tell application $myApp
[...]
end tell
END_SCRIPT
}
Thanks in advance,
-John DeYoung
The module you want is MacPerl. Yes, really. :-) It is included as part
of the Mac-Carbon distribution for Mac OS X, which includes the MacPerl.pm
module, and others that were formerly for Mac OS only.
Other options include Mac::AppleScript with its RunAppleScript() function
(that module was written before MacPerl.pm was ported to Mac OS X); and
Mac::OSA::Simple, which is a more generic interface to OSA languages, and
had an applescript() function. It also provides a way to compile an
AppleScript for executing multiple times, or saving to disk, and can load
compiled scripts from disk to execute.
All three functions -- DoAppleScript(), RunAppleScript(), and applescript()
-- function in essentially the same way. DoAppleScript() allows the most
compatibility with MacPerl scripts. applescript() doesn't have significant
advantages in its basic form, as it requires Mac-Carbon anyway, but offers
some extra control.
RunAppleScript()'s only real advantage, that I know of, is that it takes
less to install, as Mac-Carbon is a fairly large and powerful distribution,
and Mac-AppleScript just does this one thing.
There is also calling osascript directly using ``, but that is more error
prone and has no benefits of its own, apart from not needing to install
additional modules. I personally don't consider that a significant benefit.
If you are concerned about performance, all are suitable for most tasks,
except for `osascript`. I ran some Jaguar benchmarks once
(http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.macperl/2748), and here's the result
under Panther:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(timethese cmpthese);
use Mac::AppleScript 'RunAppleScript';
use MacPerl 'DoAppleScript';
use Mac::OSA::Simple 'applescript';
my $script = 'tell application Finder to get name of startup disk';
my %tests = (
applescpt = sub { applescript($script) },
doscript = sub { DoAppleScript($script) },
runscript = sub { RunAppleScript($script) },
osascript = sub { `osascript -ss -e '$script'` }
);
my $results = timethese(500, \%tests);
cmpthese($results);
=
Benchmark: timing 500 iterations of applescpt, doscript, osascript,
runscript...
applescpt: 4 wallclock secs ( 1.70 usr + 0.29 sys = 1.99 CPU) @
251.26/s (n=500)
doscript: 2 wallclock secs ( 1.11 usr + 0.18 sys = 1.29 CPU) @
387.60/s (n=500)
osascript: 240 wallclock secs ( 0.17 usr 2.34 sys + 108.88 cusr 48.57
csys = 159.96 CPU) @ 199.20/s (n=500)
runscript: 21 wallclock secs ( 6.22 usr + 6.91 sys = 13.13 CPU) @
38.08/s (n=500)
Rate runscript osascript applescpt doscript
runscript 38.1/s-- -81% -85% -90%
osascript 199/s 423%-- -21% -49%
applescpt 251/s 560% 26%-- -35%
doscript 388/s 918% 95% 54%--
=
As noted previously: I don't know why RunAppleScript is a bit slower, and
osascript is slower because it needs to call out to the shell. The
comparison table is deceptive for osascript because it only shows usr+sys,
not the rest.
Summary: I recommend installing Mac-Carbon, adding use MacPerl; to the
script, and using it as-is. If you don't want to install all of Mac-Carbon,
Mac-AppleScript is your best bet. Stay away from osascript.
Cheers,
--
Chris Nandor [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://pudge.net/
Open Source Development Network[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://osdn.com/
