The Tenex C shell is an alternative Unix shell based on and compatible with the C shell (csh). Early versions of Mac OS X shipped with tcsh as the default shell, but the default for new accounts is bash as of 10.3.

Calling the Task Run Function

Arguments are passed to Tenex C shell powered tasks as direct parameters rather than through a named entry point function. The task parameters are forwarded to the task script as command line arguments.

Result Objects

Tenex C shell tasks return results to the client by printing to stdout.

To return structured data, including the contents of files, Tenex C shell powered tasks should format result data using YAML.

KosmicTask supports both the YAML inline and block formats.

# return YAML block format array
echo "---"
echo "- Mercury"
echo "- Venus"
echo "- Earth"
echo "- Mars"
echo "- Jupiter"
echo "- Saturn"
echo "- Uranus"
echo "- Neptune"

Inline format.

# inline dictionary
set item1 = "item 1"
set item2 = "item 2"
set dict="{key1: $item1, key2: $item2}"

# css
set css="'color:green;font-weight:bold;font-style:italic;text-decoration:underline;font-size:18pt;'"

# return a YAML inline format dictionary with our dictionary as the data
echo "---"
echo "{kosmicData: $dict , kosmicStyle: $css}"

Result File Handling

KosmicTask supports the returning of file contents within task results.

KosmicTask automatically looks for a kosmicFile record containing file paths within a dictionary type result object. If found, KosmicTask will return the contents of the file or files to the client.

For Tenex C shell powered tasks files are returned as results using the following YAML dictionary syntax:

set file="capture.png"
echo "--- {kosmicFile: $file}"

A common usage scenario is that a task creates a temporary file (or files) whose contents are then returned to the client. KosmicTask therefore supports automatic temporary file creation and deletion. Temporary files created through KosmicTask are automatically deleted once the parent task has completed.

Tenex C shell powered tasks can create temporary files simply by creating files in the current working directory.

# capture screen image to file
# files created in the current directory will be deleted when the task ends
set file="capture.png"

# capture screen
screencapture -t png $file

# return a YAML inline format dictionary
echo "{kosmicFile: $file}"

Logging and Debugging

Diagnostic and logging information can be written to a task's error stream on /dev/stderr.

# send log value to stderr
echo "Goodbye, kosmos!" >/dev/stderr

Returning YAML format dictionaries

The following will generate a Missing }. error from the shell:

set dict="{key1: item 1, key2: item 2}"
echo "---"
echo $dict

We need to quote the variable so:

set dict="{key1: item 1, key2: item 2}"
echo "---"
echo "$dict"