command

is a fork of the [shell] external from Günter Geiger's ggee library.

It provides a way to execute commands from Pd. Its goal is to give more fine-grained control over the process it manages. Unlike the original [shell] external, [command] executes commands directly and does not wrap them into a shell. This means shell features cannot be used with [command]. However, they can be used in shell scripts that can be executed with [command].

Features

• runs asynchronously (without blocking Pd)
• kill method for sending SIGINT to currently running command.
• send method for sending data to STDIN of currently running command.
• env method for setting environment variables.
• separate outlet for STDERR of command.
• reports exit code on left-most outlet.
• uses dedicated method exec for command execution to avoid conflicts between command and method names.
• searches relative to patch instead of relative to Pd when calling commands with relative path. This makes projects using custom scripts or binaries more portable.
• -b flag for binary output. This can be used to bypass FUDI parsing. Useful for cases when characters like leading or trailing spaces should be kept.
• -s flag for synchronous mode. When enabled, command execution blocks Pd while maintaining depth-first order.

Authors

2002 - 2006 Guenter Geiger geiger@xdv.org
2005 - 2010 Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org
2008 - 2022 IOhannes m zmölnig zmoelnig@iem.at
2019 jyg jyg@gumo.fr
2021 - 2022 Roman Haefeli reduzent@gmail.com

License

Tcl/Tk License. Refer to LICENSE.txt