wish(1)

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NAME
wish - Simple windowing shell

SYNOPSIS
wish ?fileName arg arg ...?

OPTIONS
-colormap new Specifies that the window should have
a new private colormap instead of
using the default colormap for the
screen.

-display display Display (and screen) on which to dis-
play window.

-geometry geometry Initial geometry to use for window.
If this option is specified, its value
is stored in the geometry global vari-
able of the application's Tcl inter-
preter.

-name name Use name as the title to be displayed
in the window, and as the name of the
interpreter for send commands.

-sync Execute all X server commands syn-
chronously, so that errors are
reported immediately. This will
result in much slower execution, but
it is useful for debugging.

-use |
id ||
Specifies that the main window for the |
application is to be embedded in the |
window whose identifier is id, instead |
of being created as an independent |
toplevel window. Id must be specified |
in the same way as the value for the |
-use option for toplevel widgets (i.e. |
it has a form like that returned by |
the winfo id command).

-visual visual Specifies the visual to use for the
window. Visual may have any of the
forms supported by the Tk_GetVisual
procedure.

-- Pass all remaining arguments through
to the script's argv variable without
interpreting them. This provides a
mechanism for passing arguments such
as -name to a script instead of having
wish interpret them.
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DESCRIPTION
Wish is a simple program consisting of the Tcl command
language, the Tk toolkit, and a main program that reads
commands from standard input or from a file. It creates a
main window and then processes Tcl commands. If wish is
invoked with no arguments, or with a first argument that
starts with ``-'', then it reads Tcl commands interac-
tively from standard input. It will continue processing
commands until all windows have been deleted or until end-
of-file is reached on standard input. If there exists a
file .wishrc in the home directory of the user, wish eval-
uates the file as a Tcl script just before reading the
first command from standard input.

If wish is invoked with an initial fileName argument, then
fileName is treated as the name of a script file. Wish
will evaluate the script in fileName (which presumably
creates a user interface), then it will respond to events
until all windows have been deleted. Commands will not be
read from standard input. There is no automatic evalua-
tion of .wishrc in this case, but the script file can
always source it if desired.

OPTIONS
Wish automatically processes all of the command-line
options described in the OPTIONS summary above. Any other
command-line arguments besides these are passed through to
the application using the argc and argv variables
described later.

APPLICATION NAME AND CLASS
The name of the application, which is used for purposes
such as send commands, is taken from the -name option, if
it is specified; otherwise it is taken from fileName, if
it is specified, or from the command name by which wish
was invoked. In the last two cases, if the name contains
a ``/'' character, then only the characters after the last
slash are used as the application name.

The class of the application, which is used for purposes
such as specifying options with a RESOURCE_MANAGER prop-
erty or .Xdefaults file, is the same as its name except
that the first letter is capitalized.

VARIABLES
Wish sets the following Tcl variables:

argc Contains a count of the number of arg argu-
ments (0 if none), not including the
options described above.

argv Contains a Tcl list whose elements are the
arg arguments that follow a -- option or
don't match any of the options described in
OPTIONS above, in order, or an empty string
if there are no such arguments.

argv0 Contains fileName if it was specified.
Otherwise, contains the name by which wish
was invoked.

geometry If the -geometry option is specified, wish
copies its value into this variable. If
the variable still exists after fileName
has been evaluated, wish uses the value of
the variable in a wm geometry command to
set the main window's geometry.

tcl_interactive
Contains 1 if wish is reading commands
interactively (fileName was not specified
and standard input is a terminal-like
device), 0 otherwise.

SCRIPT FILES
If you create a Tcl script in a file whose first line is
#!/usr/local/bin/wish
then you can invoke the script file directly from your
shell if you mark it as executable. This assumes that
wish has been installed in the default location in
/usr/local/bin; if it's installed somewhere else then
you'll have to modify the above line to match. Many UNIX
systems do not allow the #! line to exceed about 30 char-
acters in length, so be sure that the wish executable can
be accessed with a short file name.

An even better approach is to start your script files with
the following three lines:
#!/bin/sh
# the next line restarts using wish \
exec wish "$0" "$@"
This approach has three advantages over the approach in
the previous paragraph. First, the location of the wish
binary doesn't have to be hard-wired into the script: it
can be anywhere in your shell search path. Second, it
gets around the 30-character file name limit in the previ-
ous approach. Third, this approach will work even if wish
is itself a shell script (this is done on some systems in
order to handle multiple architectures or operating sys-
tems: the wish script selects one of several binaries to

run). The three lines cause both sh and wish to process
the script, but the exec is only executed by sh. sh pro-
cesses the script first; it treats the second line as a
comment and executes the third line. The exec statement
cause the shell to stop processing and instead to start up
wish to reprocess the entire script. When wish starts up,
it treats all three lines as comments, since the backslash
at the end of the second line causes the third line to be
treated as part of the comment on the second line.

PROMPTS
When wish is invoked interactively it normally prompts for
each command with ``% ''. You can change the prompt by
setting the variables tcl_prompt1 and tcl_prompt2. If
variable tcl_prompt1 exists then it must consist of a Tcl
script to output a prompt; instead of outputting a prompt
wish will evaluate the script in tcl_prompt1. The vari-
able tcl_prompt2 is used in a similar way when a newline
is typed but the current command isn't yet complete; if
tcl_prompt2 isn't set then no prompt is output for incom-
plete commands.

KEYWORDS
shell, toolkit