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The Shell and Environment globals are provided to
access the underlying operating system's command shell functionality
from within the Slate environment. Shell provides a dispatch
hook for shell-related methods, while Environment acts as
a Dictionary of the current shell context's defined variables
and values. They support several primitive methods as follows:
- Shell enter
- enters the host operating system's command-line
shell. This has no effect on the Slate environment directly except
for suspending and resuming it.
- Shell runProgram: programName withArgs: argsArray
- executes
the program with the given name and passes it the arguments which
must be Strings.
- Shell execute: scriptFilename
- passes the contents of
the file named along to the shell, returning its output.
- Environment at: varName
- returns the value stored in a
given environment variable.
- Environment at: varName put: newValue
- stores the new
value into the given environment variable named.
- Environment keys
- returns an Array of the environment
variable names defined in the context that Slate was executed in.
This result is independent of the actual environment variables.
- Environment values
- returns an Array of the environment
variable values in the context that Slate was executed in, in the
same order as the keys are returned. This result is independent of
the actual environment variables.
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Brian Rice
2004-08-24