AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Osascript

Three command-line tools are provided for accessing AppleScript from Unix—osalang, osacompile, and osascript—of which osascript is the most important. So let's talk about the other two first.

osalang lists the scripting components present on your machine (see "The Open Scripting Architecture" in Chapter 3):

% 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 X and JavaScript.) 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 osalang man page 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 3 calls the generic system component or GSC); "AppleScript" is the AppleScript scripting 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, because 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.

osacompile takes as argument a text file, or some text provided on the command line, and generates a compiled ...