Hi Tom,

It's exactly this issue that forced me to stop using Rebol. Every other
language i've come across allows me to make use of the amazing variety of
command-line tools on UNIX such as ls, grep, locate etc and store the
stdout in a variable for further processing. REBOL/Command lets you do
this but only at a price of US$300.

This is the primary reason why I am trading in REBOL for tcl 'tickle'.
This language has a similar structure to rebol but can access external
commands. For example:

set newline = "\n"
puts "The following users are logged in $newline [exec users]"

This is very similar to rebol syntax except you can merge strings with 
variables more easily than using 'print 'form 'rejoin combinations. Tcl
also understands blocks in a similar way to rebol:

REBOL [] ; a REBOL script
foreach number [1 2 3] [
    switch :number [
        1 [print "One"]
        2 [print "Two"]
        3 [print "Three"]
    ]
]

# A tcl script
foreach number {1 2 3} {
    switch $number {
        1 {puts "one";}
        2 {puts "two";}
        3 {puts "three";}
    }
}

Tcl/Tk also has an excellent windowing system with much clearer syntax
than the 'faces' of REBOL/View.

But best of all Tcl doesn't time out - ever - which in REBOL is driving me 
batsh!t. I'm sure many will agree with that last statement if nothing
else.

REBOL is a fantasic language and I love the syntax but problems with
controlling ports, using parse and particularly interacting with external
applications makes it pretty useless for managing UNIX servers, which
is basically what I need. Fortunaetly I can still take advantage of some
of REBOL's better features by calling it from Tcl scripts like this:

exec rebol --do send [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Sorry... Can't afford it"; 

Like they say Tom, "The right tools for the right job!"

SpliFF

 On Mon, 29 Jan 2001
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> hey guys,
> 
> I'm the king of easy questions.  I like to print nifty little
> one-liners to stdout with rebol, but I can't seem to get them to my $
> prompt.
> 
> In my boundless ignorance, I tried a shell script:
> 
> one-liner.r | bash
> 
> That obviously didn't work.
> 
> anybody have any luck with stuff like this?
> 
> --
> 
> Eat more spinach.
> -tom


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