After command usage in Tcl - scripting

So my understanding is that after command can be used to delay the execution of a script or a command for certain ms but when i execute the below command, the output is printed immediately
Command:
after 4000 [list puts "hello"]
Output:
hello
after#0
Question: Why was the output not delayed for 4s here?

That what you wrote works; I just tried it at a tclsh prompt like this:
% after 4000 [list puts "hello"]; after 5000 set x 1; vwait x
Did you write something else instead, such as this:
after 4000 [puts "hello"]
In this case, instead of delaying the execution of puts, you'd be calling it immediately and using its result (the empty string) as the argument to after (which is valid, but useless).
Think of [list …] as a special kind of quoting.
The other possibility when running interactively is that you take several seconds between running the after and starting the event loop (since the callbacks are only ever run by the event loop). You won't see that in wish of course — that's always running an event loop — but it's possible in tclsh as that doesn't start an event loop by default. But I'd put that as a far distant second in terms of probability to omitting the list word…

Related

Asynchronous reading of an stdout

I've wrote this simple script, it generates one output line per second (generator.sh):
for i in {0..5}; do echo $i; sleep 1; done
The raku program will launch this script and will print the lines as soon as they appear:
my $proc = Proc::Async.new("sh", "generator.sh");
$proc.stdout.tap({ .print });
my $promise = $proc.start;
await $promise;
All works as expected: every second we see a new line. But let's rewrite generator in raku (generator.raku):
for 0..5 { .say; sleep 1 }
and change the first line of the program to this:
my $proc = Proc::Async.new("raku", "generator.raku");
Now something wrong: first we see first line of output ("0"), then a long pause, and finally we see all the remaining lines of the output.
I tried to grab output of the generators via script command:
script -c 'sh generator.sh' script-sh
script -c 'raku generator.raku' script-raku
And to analyze them in a hexadecimal editor, and it looks like they are the same: after each digit, bytes 0d and 0a follow.
Why is such a difference in working with seemingly identical generators? I need to understand this because I am going to launch an external program and process its output online.
Why is such a difference in working with seemingly identical generators?
First, with regard to the title, the issue is not about the reading side, but rather the writing side.
Raku's I/O implementation looks at whether STDOUT is attached to a TTY. If it is a TTY, any output is immediately written to the output handle. However, if it's not a TTY, then it will apply buffering, which results in a significant performance improvement but at the cost of the output being chunked by the buffer size.
If you change generator.raku to disable output buffering:
$*OUT.out-buffer = False; for 0..5 { .say; sleep 1 }
Then the output will be seen immediately.
I need to understand this because I am going to launch an external program and process its output online.
It'll only be an issue if the external program you launch also has such a buffering policy.
In addition to answer of #Jonathan Worthington. Although buffering is an issue of writing side, it is possible to cope with this on the reading side. stdbuf, unbuffer, script can be used on linux (see this discussion). On windows only winpty helps me, which I found here.
So, if there are winpty.exe, winpty-agent.exe, winpty.dll, msys-2.0.dll files in working directory, this code can be used to run program without buffering:
my $proc = Proc::Async.new(<winpty.exe -Xallow-non-tty -Xplain raku generator.raku>);

Running command in perl6, commands that work in shell produce failure when run inside perl6

I'm trying to run a series of shell commands with Perl6 to the variable $cmd, which look like
databricks jobs run-now --job-id 35 --notebook-params '{"directory": "s3://bucket", "output": "s3://bucket/extension", "sampleID_to_canonical_id_map": "s3://somefile.csv"}'
Splitting the command by everything after notebook-params
my $cmd0 = 'databricks jobs run-now --job-id 35 --notebook-params ';
my $args = "'{\"directory\": \"$in-dir\", \"output\": \"$out-dir\",
\"sampleID_to_canonical_id_map\": \"$map\"}'"; my $run = run $cmd0,
$args, :err, :out;
Fails. No answer given either by Databricks or the shell. Stdout and stderr are empty.
Splitting the entire command by white space
my #cmd = $cmd.split(/\s+/);
my $run = run $cmd, :err, :out
Error: Got unexpected extra arguments ("s3://bucket", "output":
"s3://bucket/extension",
"sampleID_to_canonical_id_map":
"s3://somefile.csv"}'
Submitting the command as a string
my $cmd = "$cmd0\"$in-dir\", \"output\": \"$out-dir\", \"sampleID_to_canonical_id_map\": \"$map\"}'";
again, stdout and stderr are empty. Exit code 1.
this is something about how run can only accept arrays, and not strings (I'm curious why)
If I copy and paste the command that was given to Perl6's run, it works when given from the shell. It doesn't work when given through perl6. This isn't good, because I have to execute this command hundreds of times.
Perhaps Perl6's shell https://docs.perl6.org/routine/shell would be better? I didn't use that, because the manual suggests that run is safer. I want to capture both stdout and stderr inside a Proc class
EDIT: I've gotten this running with shell but have encountered other problems not related to what I originally posted. I'm not sure if this qualifies as being answered then. I just decided to use backticks with perl5. Yes, backticks are deprecated, but they get the job done.
I'm trying to run a series of shell commands
To run shell commands, call the shell routine. It passes the positional argument you provide it, coerced to a single string, to the shell of the system you're running the P6 program on.
For running commands without involving a shell, call the run routine. The first positional argument is coerced to a string and passed to the operating system as the filename of the program you want run. The remaining arguments are concatenated together with a space in between each argument to form a single string that is passed as a command line to the program being run.
my $cmd0 = 'databricks jobs run-now --job-id 35 --notebook-params ';
That's wrong for both shell and run:
shell only accepts one argument and $cmd0 is incomplete.
The first argument for run is a string interpreted by the OS as the filename of a program to be run and $cmd0 isn't a filename.
So in both cases you'll get either no result or nonsense results.
Your other two experiments are also invalid in their own ways as you discovered.
this is something about how run can only accept arrays, and not strings (I'm curious why)
run can accept a single argument. It would be passed to the OS as the name of the program to be run.
It can accept two arguments. The first would be the program name, the second the command line passed to the program.
It can accept three or more arguments. The first would be the program name, the rest would be concatenated to form the command line passed to the program. (There are cases where this is more convenient coding wise than the two argument form.)
run can also accept a single array. The first element would the program name and the rest the command line passed to it. (There are cases where this is more convenient.)
I just decided to use backticks with perl5. Yes, backticks are deprecated, but they get the job done.
Backticks are subject to code injection and shell interpolation attacks and errors. But yes, if they work, they work.
P6 has direct equivalents of most P5 features. This includes backticks. P6 has two variants:
The safer P6 alternative to backticks is qx. The qx quoting construct calls the shell but does not interpolate P6 variables so it has the same sort of level of danger as using shell with a single quoted string.
The qqx variant is the direct equivalent of P5 backticks or using shell with a double quoted string so it suffers from the same security dangers.
Two mistakes:
the simplistic split cuts up the last, single parameter into multiple arguments
you are passing $cmd to run, not #cmd
use strict;
my #cmd = ('/tmp/dummy.sh', '--param1', 'param2 with spaces');
my $run = run #cmd, :err, :out;
print(#cmd ~ "\n");
print("EXIT_CODE:\t" ~ $run.exitcode ~ "\n");
print("STDOUT:\t" ~ $run.out.slurp ~ "\n");
print("STDERR:\t" ~ $run.err.slurp ~ "\n");
output:
$ cat /tmp/dummy.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo "prog: '$0'"
echo "arg1: '$1'"
echo "arg2: '$2'"
exit 0
$ perl6 dummy.pl
/tmp/dummy.sh --param1 param2 with spaces
EXIT_CODE: 0
STDOUT: prog: '/tmp/dummy.sh'
arg1: '--param1'
arg2: 'param2 with spaces'
STDERR:
If you can avoid generating $cmd as single string, I would generate it into #cmd directly. Otherwise you'll have to implement complex split operation that handles quoting.

Ghostscript for PS integrity test: terminate at EOF, return error unless stack is empty

To test the integrity of PostScript files, I'd like to run Ghostscript in the following way:
Return 1 (or other error code) on error
Return 0 (success) at EOF if stack is empty
Return 1 (or other error code) otherwise
I could run gs in the background, and use a timeout to force termination if gs hangs with items left on the stack. Is there an easier solution?
Ghostscript won't hang if you send files as input (unless you write a program which enters an infinite loop or otherwise fails to reach a halting state). Having items on any of the stacks won't cause it to hang.
On the other hand, it won't give you an error if a PostScript program leaves operands on the operand stack (or dictionaries on the dictionary stack, clips on the clip stack or gstates on the graphics state stack). This is because that's not an error, and since PostScript interpreters normally run in a job server loop its not a problem either. Terminating the job returns control to the job server loop which does a save and restore round the total job, thereby clearing up anything left behind.
I'd suggest that if you really want to do this you need to adopt the same approach, you need to write a PostScript program which executes the PostScript program you want to 'test', then checks the operand stack (and other stacks if required) to see if anything is left. Note that you will want to execute the test program in a stopped context, as an error in the course of the program will clearly potentially leave stuff lying around.
Ghostscript returns 0 on a clean exit and a value less than 0 for errors, if I remember correctly. You would need to use signalerror in your test framework in order to raise an error if items are left at the end of a program.
[EDIT]
Anything supplied to Ghostscript on the command line by either -s or -d is defined in systemdict, so if we do -sInputFileName=/test.pdf then we will find in systemdict a key /InputFileName whose value is a string with the contents (/test.pdf). We can use that to pass the filename to our program.
The stopped operator takes an executable array as an argument, and returns either true or false depending on whether an error occurred while executing the array (3rd Edition PLRM, p 697).
So we need to run the program contained in the filename we've been given, and do it in a 'stopped' context. Something like this:
{InputFileName run} stopped
{
(Error occurred\n) print flush
%% Potentially check $error for more information.
}{
(program terminated normally\n) print flush
%% Here you could check the various stacks
} ifelse
The following, based 90% on KenS's answer, is 99% satisfactory:
Program checkIntegrity.ps:
{Script run} stopped
{
(\n===> Integrity test failed: ) print Script print ( has error\n\n) print
handleerror
(ignore this error which only serves to force a return value of 1) /syntaxerror signalerror
}{
% script passed, now check the stack
count dup 0 eq {
pop (\n===> Integrity test passed: ) print Script print ( terminated normally\n\n) print
} {
(\n===> Integrity test failed: ) print Script print ( left ) print
3 string cvs print ( item(s) on stack\n\n) print
Script /syntaxerror signalerror
} ifelse
} ifelse
quit
Execute with
gs -q -sScript=CodeToBeChecked.ps checkIntegrity.ps ; echo $?
For the last 1% of satisfaction I would need a replacement for
(blabla) /syntaxerror signalerror
It forces exit with return code 1, but is very verbous and distracts from the actual error in the checked script that is reported by handleerror. Therefore a cleaner way to exit(1) would be welcome.

while [[ condition ]] stalls on loop exit

I have a problem with ksh in that a while loop is failing to obey the "while" condition. I should add now that this is ksh88 on my client's Solaris box. (That's a separate problem that can't be addressed in this forum. ;) I have seen Lance's question and some similar but none that I have found seem to address this. (Disclaimer: NO I haven't looked at every ksh question in this forum)
Here's a very cut down piece of code that replicates the problem:
1 #!/usr/bin/ksh
2 #
3 go=1
4 set -x
5 tail -0f loop-test.txt | while [[ $go -eq 1 ]]
6 do
7 read lbuff
8 set $lbuff
9 nwords=$#
10 printf "Line has %d words <%s>\n" $nwords "${lbuff}"
11 if [[ "${lbuff}" = "0" ]]
12 then
13 printf "Line consists of %s; time to absquatulate\n" $lbuff
14 go=0 # Violate the WHILE condition to get out of loop
15 fi
16 done
17 printf "\nLooks like I've fallen out of the loop\n"
18 exit 0
The way I test this is:
Run loop-test.sh in background mode
In a different window I run commands like "echo some nonsense >>loop_test.txt" (w/o the quotes, of course)
When I wish to exit, I type "echo 0 >>loop-test.txt"
What happens? It indeed sets go=0 and displays the line:
Line consists of 0; time to absquatulate
but does not exit the loop. To break out I append one more line to the txt file. The loop does NOT process that line and just falls out of the loop, issuing that "fallen out" message before exiting.
What's going on with this? I don't want to use "break" because in the actual script, the loop is monitoring the log of a database engine and the flag is set when it sees messages that the engine is shutting down. The actual script must still process those final lines before exiting.
Open to ideas, anyone?
Thanks much!
-- J.
OK, that flopped pretty quick. After reading a few other posts, I found an answer given by dogbane that sidesteps my entire pipe-to-while scheme. His is the second answer to a question (from 2013) where I see neeraj is using the same scheme I'm using.
What was wrong? The pipe-to-while has always worked for input that will end, like a file or a command with a distinct end to its output. However, from a tail command, there is no distinct EOF. Hence, the while-in-a-subshell doesn't know when to terminate.
Dogbane's solution: Don't use a pipe. Applying his logic to my situation, the basic loop is:
while read line
do
# put loop body here
done < <(tail -0f ${logfile})
No subshell, no problem.
Caveat about that syntax: There must be a space between the two < operators; otherwise it looks like a HEREIS document with bad syntax.
Er, one more catch: The syntax did not work in ksh, not even in the mksh (under cygwin) which emulates ksh93. But it did work in bash. So my boss is gonna have a good laugh at me, 'cause he knows I dislike bash.
So thanks MUCH, dogbane.
-- J
After articulating the problem and sleeping on it, the reason for the described behavior came to me: After setting go=0, the control flow of the loop still depends on another line of data coming in from STDIN via that pipe.
And now that I have realized the cause of the weirdness, I can speculate on an alternative way of reading from the stream. For the moment I am thinking of the following solution:
Open the input file as STDIN (Need to research the exec syntax for that)
When the condition occurs, close STDIN (Again, need to research the syntax for that)
It should then be safe to use the more intuitive:while read lbuffat the top of the loop.
I'll test this out today and post the result. I'd hope someone else benefit from the method (if it works).

tcl tcltest unknown option -run

When I run ANY test I get the same message. Here is an example test:
package require tcltest
namespace import -force ::tcltest::*
test foo-1.1 {save 1 in variable name foo} {} {
set foo 1
} {1}
I get the following output:
WARNING: unknown option -run: should be one of -asidefromdir, -constraints, -debug, -errfile, -file, -limitconstraints, -load, -loadfile, -match, -notfile, -outfile, -preservecore, -relateddir, -singleproc, -skip, -testdir, -tmpdir, or -verbose
I've tried multiple tests and nothing seems to work. Does anyone know how to get this working?
Update #1:
The above error was my fault, it was due to it being run in my script. However if I run the following at a command line I got no output:
[root#server1 ~]$ tcl
tcl>package require tcltest
2.3.3
tcl>namespace import -force ::tcltest::*
tcl>test foo-1.1 {save 1 in variable name foo} {expr 1+1} {2}
tcl>echo [test foo-1.1 {save 1 in variable name foo} {expr 1+1} {2}]
tcl>
How do I get it to output pass or fail?
You don't get any output from the test command itself (as long as the test passes, as in the example: if it fails, the command prints a "contents of test case" / "actual result" / "expected result" summary; see also the remark on configuration below). The test statistics are saved internally: you can use the cleanupTests command to print the Total/Passed/Skipped/Failed numbers (that command also resets the counters and does some cleanup).
(When you run runAllTests, it runs test files in child processes, intercepting the output from each file's cleanupTests and adding them up to a grand total.)
The internal statistics collected during testing is available in AFACT undocumented namespace variables like ::tcltest::numTests. If you want to work with the statistics yourself, you can access them before calling cleanupTests, e.g.
parray ::tcltest::numTests
array set myTestData [array get ::tcltest::numTests]
set passed $::tcltest::numTests(Passed)
Look at the source for tcltest in your library to see what variables are available.
The amount of output from the test command is configurable, and you can get output even when the test passes if you add p / pass to the -verbose option. This option can also let you have less output on failure, etc.
You can also create a command called ::tcltest::ReportToMaster which, if it exists, will be called by cleanupTests with the pertinent data as arguments. Doing so seems to suppress both output of statistics and at least most resetting and cleanup. (I didn't go very far in investigating that method.) Be aware that messing about with this is more likely to create trouble than solve problems, but if you are writing your own testing software based on tcltest you might still want to look at it.
Oh, and please use the newer syntax for the test command. It's more verbose, but you'll thank yourself later on if you get started with it.
Obligatory-but-fairly-useless (in this case) documentation link: tcltest