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Jerry Beck - 21 Sep 2003 01:41 GMT

I'm looking for any information I can get on using perl on Mac OS X?

Where do I start?
What books are available?
Is there any special sites covering perl and FileMaker on OS X server?
Where can I get Sample scripts?

How do I activate a script from a text editor?
How do I activate a script which does a controlled shutdown of my
servers when a power failure occurs? I have a network management card
in my APC.

Any light on the subjects would be appreciated.

Jerry

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Doug McNutt - 21 Sep 2003 21:07 GMT

>I'm looking for any information I can get on using perl on Mac OS X?
>
>Where do I start?

Terminal

>What books are available?

O'Reilly. Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Perl in a Nutshell

>Is there any special site covering perl and FileMaker on OS X server?

Donno. but perl with more general databases postgres zB is common.

>How do I activate a script from a text editor?

BBEdit worksheets do it directly, The "Execute Text" service is available for download. Project Builder will execute scripts. Maintaining state, like PATH and PWD is problematic with most editors and MPW is not available as a shell (damnit). My son claims emacs is the way to go but it's not Mac.

FMP likes AppleScripts. osascript does similar things. Mag::Glue is worth a look.

>How do I activate a script which does a controlled shutdown of my servers when a power failure occurs? I have a network management card in my APC.

Sounds like fun. I wouldn't want to be the test engineer.

from Terminal or BBEdit the commands:
apropos <anything>
man <name of a tool>
are good things to try.

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Applescript syntax is like English spelling:
Roughly, but not thoroughly, thought through.

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Peter N Lewis - 22 Sep 2003 01:54 GMT

> >How do I activate a script from a text editor?
>
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
>editors and MPW is not available as a shell (damnit). My son claims
>emacs is the way to go but it's not Mac.

BBEdit's shell worksheets are pretty much as good as MPW for most
things. And it does remember the PWD.

Emacs is available under Mac OS 8/9 & X. See
http://www.porkrind.org/emacs/ . Support for Mac OS X will be built
in to emacs from 21.4 upwards apparently. Not that I ever use emacs
myself, but some people love it for some reason.

Enjoy,
Peter.

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<http://www.interarchy.com/> <http://documentation.interarchy.com/>

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Phil Dobbin - 21 Sep 2003 21:18 GMT

> I'm looking for any information I can get on using perl on Mac OS X?

> What books are available?

Apart from the venerable Learning Perl, another good O'Reilly book is Perl
for Web Site Management which has a gentler learning curve

> Where can I get Sample scripts?

After ingesting above books a good place is The Perl Cookbook (O'Reilly
again: I think Tim should give us all a discount :-)

Have fun,

Regards,

Phil.

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Bill Stephenson - 23 Sep 2003 05:29 GMT

> I'm looking for any information I can get on using perl on Mac OS X?
>
> Where do I start?

This is a pretty good place ;)

> What books are available?

I bought the "Perl CD Bookshelf" and copied the contents to my hard drive
then setup a bookmark in my web browser. I consistently use the "Perl
Cookbook" more than any of the others, so I'd have to say it's my favorite.

> Is there any special sites covering perl and FileMaker on OS X server?
> Where can I get Sample scripts?

Dunno.... But I think you can use a perl script to run an Applescript,
which you should be able to find for FMP.

> How do I activate a script from a text editor?

Start the "Terminal" app. Type:

[localhost:~] MyMac% perl path/toMy/perlScript.pl

Then get BBEdit. The free "Lite" version will get you started and a discount
on the "Full" version (which you'll want asap). It's got great built-in
support for perl and provide syntax checking, and let's you run perl scripts
in a few different ways with just a click.

> How do I activate a script which does a controlled shutdown of my
> servers when a power failure occurs? I have a network management card
> in my APC.

One approach might be to use a perl script run from Cron that interacts with
the APC. If the APC can send a message to the System OS, then it should be
able to tell perl (or let perl find out) that something has happened. A
check for an existing "Warning" file should be enough to get things started.

> Any light on the subjects would be appreciated.
>
> Jerry

Cheers,

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Bill Stephenson
www.PerlHelp.com
1-417-546-5593

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Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / September 2003

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