AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

Osascript

Three command-line tools are provided for accessing AppleScript from Unix. The first, osalang , lists the scripting components present on your machine (see Section 4.2):

$ osalang -l
ascr appl cgxervdh  AppleScript
scpt appl cgxervdh  Generic Scripting System

If you have other OSA components installed, they will also appear. For example, if you use Script Debugger, you’ll see AppleScript Debugger and JavaScript. These do in fact appear on my machine, but to reduce confusion, they are not shown here.

The two four-letter codes identifying each component are used by OSA programmers, but typically won’t arise in the context of your AppleScript experience. Then comes a series of flags describing the capabilities of this scripting component (see the manpages for their meanings). Finally, we have the name of the component. The “Generic Scripting System” is the general front end to the OSA (what Chapter 4 calls the GSC); “AppleScript” is the AppleScript component in particular. You can use either of these two terms as a language specifier in calling the other two command-line tools, but their effect will be identical, since the GSC will treat AppleScript as the default component. In general, unless you are using other OSA scripting components, you’ll have no need for osalang.

The osacompile command takes as argument a text file, or some text provided on the command line, and generates a compiled script file or applet. There are options letting you determine the characteristics of ...