NAME
tclsh - Simple shell containing Tcl interpreter

SYNOPSIS
tclsh ?fileName arg arg ...?

DESCRIPTION

Tclsh is a shell-like application that reads Tcl commands from its standard input or from a file and evaluates them. If invoked with no arguments then it runs interactively, reading Tcl commands from standard input and printing command results and error messages to standard output. It runs until the exit command is invoked or until it reaches end-of-file on its standard input. If there exists a file .tclshrc in the home directory of the user, tclsh evaluates the file as a Tcl script just before reading the first command from standard input.

SCRIPT FILES

If tclsh is invoked with arguments then the first argument is the name of a script file and any additional arguments are made available to the script as variables (see below). Instead of reading commands from standard input tclsh will read Tcl commands from the named file; tclsh will exit when it reaches the end of the file. There is no automatic evaluation of .tclshrc in this case, but the script file can always source it if desired.

If you create a Tcl script in a file whose first line is #!/usr/local/bin/tclsh then you can invoke the script file directly from your shell if you mark the file as executable. This assumes that tclsh has been installed in the default location in /usr/local/bin; if it's installed somewhere else then you'll have to modify the above line to match.

VARIABLES

Tclsh sets the following Tcl variables:

argc
    Contains a count of the number of arg arguments (0 if none), not including the name of the script file.

argv
    Contains a Tcl list whose elements are the arg arguments, in order, or an empty string if there are no arg arguments.

argv0
    Contains fileName if it was specified. Otherwise, contains the name by which tclsh was invoked.

tcl_interactive
    Contains 1 if tclsh is running interactively (no fileName was specified and standard input is a terminal-like device), 0 otherwise.

PROMPTS

When tclsh is invoked interactively it normally prompts for each command with ``% ''. You can change the prompt by setting the variables tcl_prompt1 and tcl_prompt2. If variable tcl_prompt1 exists then it must consist of a Tcl script to output a prompt; instead of outputting a prompt tclsh will evaluate the script in tcl_prompt1. The variable tcl_prompt2 is used in a similar way when a newline is typed but the current command isn't yet complete; if tcl_prompt2 isn't set then no prompt is output for incomplete commands.

KEYWORDS
argument, interpreter, prompt, script file, shell