AppleScript for System Admins WebCast
Justin Elliott writes "Watch Apple Computer's own AppleScript wizard, Sal Soghoian, present 'AppleScript For System Admins' during Mac OS X Labs' September 24 webcast. Learn about essential AppleScript tools and tips under Mac OS X. Discover how AppleScript can be used for administrative tasks, and how to use AppleScript to effectively interact with the Mac OS X file system."
You can download the webcast software, but will not be able to connect or see anything until 1 PM EDT next wednesday.
Where are the shell scripts?
What did you want to do from the shell? Some programs are designed to be used from a command line in the Unix way, others are happier being controlled via the GUI and OSA [which you can still get to from the shell using open(1) and osascript(1)]. Those commands won't completely eliminate Applescript, but they will let you stick mostly to sh and only bring in OSA where the target program demands it.
Serious question:
Can Python (or Perl, or anything else) interact with other running OS X programs?
That's why we've used Applescript with OS 9 so much. We can write scripts that tell Quark XPress what to do. We can pull info from FileMaker and format it and place it in Quark auto-magicly. We've written scripts that manipulate text in Quark text boxes without ever leaving Quark - like they're just another menu item. We can do similar things with Outlook Express and BBEdit and any number of other apps. I've written a bunch of Applescripts, but very few that didn't interact with at least one commercial application.
Now if I can replace
FileMaker <- Applescript -> Quark
with
MySQL <- Python/Perl/etc -> Quark
that would seriously rock. Are you saying I can do that? Can you post a link to some info on getting started?