Tiger and Unix scripting
It has been quite some time since I have had a chance to write. I finally made the switch to Tiger. It was a long process for me. I installed a DVD drive into my blue and white G3 to make Tiger installation easier. While I was upgrading my machine I decided to soup it up a little by installing a G4 processor. Apparently my motherboard had someting blow out with the new clock speed. After much troubleshooting I finally decided to send the processor back and I went to a refurbished dual processor G4 and retired my G3. The blue and white gave me many good years and I was sad to see it go. But after all that, I got Tiger up and running on my new mac. I pulled the drives from my G3 to facilitate getting to all my old data and paid for applications. I was concerned about the activation of software such as Quark and Adobe CS, but they all reactivated on my new machine.
Now with regard to scripting in Tiger. There are new methods to automate things. Apple has always tried to make automation available to the end user. Applescript has been around since System 7 and before that Hypercard. But now there is the new technology called Automator. This looks very promising. But it still has some overhead that comes along with it. I’ve seen some interesting automator scripts that launch Mail and send out iCal events and dates. This is cool, but using a unix script is much faster since it has no GUI app that has to launch. Try something like this php script:
#!/usr/bin/php
< ?php
$to = 'user@domain.com' ;
$subject = "Test";
$message = "This is a php mail test.";
mail($to, $subject, $message);
?>
Tiger comes with Perl 5.8 pre-loaded. Bash is the default shell and should be unless you have been using tcsh or another shell and you migrate your user account. Bash is: GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (powerpc-apple-darwin8.0). Applescript is version 1.10. The Applescript Script Editor is version 2.1. PHP is version PHP 4.3.11.