OSASCRIPT(1) BSD General Commands Manual OSASCRIPT(1)NAMEosascript — execute AppleScripts and other OSA language scripts
SYNOPSISosascript [-l language] [-s flags] [-e statement | programfile]
[argument ...]
DESCRIPTIONosascript executes the given script. It was designed for use with Apple‐
Script, but will work with any Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) lan‐
guage. To get a list of the OSA languages installed on your system, use
osalang(1). For documentation on AppleScript itself, see
⟨http://www.apple.com/applescript⟩.
osascript will look for the script in one of the following three places:
1. Specified line by line using -e switches on the command line.
2. Contained in the file specified by the first filename on the command
line. This file may be plain text or a compiled script.
3. Passed in using standard input. This works only if there are no
filename arguments; to pass arguments to a STDIN-read script, you
must explicitly specify “-” for the script name.
Any arguments following the script will be passed as a list of strings to
the direct parameter of the “run” handler. For example:
a.scpt:
on run argv
return "hello, " & item 1 of argv & "."
end run
% osascript a.scpt world
hello, world.
The options are as follows:
-e statement
Enter one line of a script. If -e is given, osascript will not
look for a filename in the argument list. Multiple -e options may
be given to build up a multi-line script. Because most scripts use
characters that are special to many shell programs (e.g., Apple‐
Script uses single and double quote marks, “(”, “)”, and “*”), the
statement will have to be correctly quoted and escaped to get it
past the shell intact.
-l language
Override the language for any plain text files. Normally, plain
text files are compiled as AppleScript.
-s flags
Modify the output style. The flags argument is a string consisting
of any of the modifier characters e, h, o, and s. Multiple modi‐
fiers can be concatenated in the same string, and multiple -s
options can be specified. The modifiers come in exclusive pairs;
if conflicting modifiers are specified, the last one takes prece‐
dence. The meanings of the modifier characters are as follows:
h Print values in human-readable form (default).
s Print values in recompilable source form.
osascript normally prints its results in human-readable form:
strings do not have quotes around them, characters are not
escaped, braces for lists and records are omitted, etc. This is
generally more useful, but can introduce ambiguities. For exam‐
ple, the lists ‘{"foo", "bar"}’ and ‘{{"foo", {"bar"}}}’ would
both be displayed as ‘foo, bar’. To see the results in an unam‐
biguous form that could be recompiled into the same value, use
the s modifier.
e Print script errors to stderr (default).
o Print script errors to stdout.
osascript normally prints script errors to stderr, so downstream
clients only see valid results. When running automated tests,
however, using the o modifier lets you distinguish script
errors, which you care about matching, from other diagnostic
output, which you don't.
SEE ALSOosacompile(1), osalang(1)HISTORYosascript in Mac OS X 10.0 would translate ‘\r’ characters in the output
to ‘\n’ and provided c and r modifiers for the -s option to change this.
osascript now always leaves the output alone; pipe through tr(1) if nec‐
essary.
Prior to Mac OS X 10.4, osascript did not allow passing arguments to the
script.
Mac OS X June 10, 2003 Mac OS X
