Unix Scripting Host

[Roman Suzi]

On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Gerhard [iso-8859-1] HДring wrote:

>Please excuse this off-topicish post. I was looking for something similar to
>the Windows Scripting Host in the Unix world: a library where an application
>can register functions and types that can then be used by any scripting
>language that bothers to implement the "Unix Scripting Host" interface. The
>application language should not be limited to C or C++.

AFAIK, there is no Scripting host in UNIX.
UNIX itself is a large scriptitng host where miriads of tasks
are done by using scripts which process text files.

You can do

os.system("yourprogram args")

from almost any language. You can also pipe thru standard stderr, stdin
and stdout files or communicate via UNIX sockets or by other means.

But you can't register functions, you can make very compact and fast
standalone programs which do 1 task well and call them.

This is how UNIX does it and this is a point in which UNIX
is different from Windows. (I do not know about all Unices out there).

You can think about scripts in UNIX as functions and you
will have your Unix Scripting Host for free ;-)

For example, there is a nice Python script by  Remco Gerlich
at Useless Python which allows you to write things like this:

for i in `range 1 51 2 file%03d`
do
  mv $i MyFiles
done

How is it different from registering functions somewhere
in the deeps of the proprietary Windows system?

>The closest thing I could find was XPCOM from the Mozilla project. I
>thought that KDE2 or GNOME might offer this already, but I didn't find
>anything (except the relatively heavyweight CORBA approach).

>Any suggestions/pointers?

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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