How can I call an external command (as if I had typed it into the Windows command prompt or Unix shell) from within a Julia program? I know this is possible with other languages but I'm not sure how to do it in Julia.
According to the Julia docs,
The command is never run with a shell. Instead, Julia parses the command syntax directly, appropriately interpolating variables and splitting on words as the shell would, respecting shell quoting syntax. The command is run as Julia's immediate child process, using fork and exec calls.
A simple example is as follows:
julia> testcommand = `echo HelloWorld`
`echo HelloWorld`
julia> typeof(testcommand)
Cmd
julia> run(testcommand);
HelloWorld
See the docs linked above for a deeper dive of the low-level details occurring of what is going on here.
Related
I have a script main.jl which prints a simple "Hello world" string:
println("Hello world!")
However, when trying to run the script through the terminal like this:
julia> main.jl
I get the error:
ERROR: type #main has no field jl
All the information I can find online suggests calling the script like I do to run it. I have assured that I'm in the correct directory - what am I doing wrong?
You are trying to run the file from the Julia REPL (as indicated by the julia> prompt at the beginning of the line). There, you have to include the file as #AndreWildberg mentions. This will run the commands from the file as if you had typed them into the REPL.
The information you found online might have been about running Julia from "normal" terminal, aka a console shell like bash on Linux. There, running julia main.jl will run the program, although the REPL method above is usually preferred for working with Julia.
(question about calling the script with arguments asked in the comment):
First of all, I'll mention that this is not the usual workflow with Julia scripts. I've been writing Julia code for years, and I had to look up how to handle command-line arguments because I've never once used them in Julia: usually what's done instead is that you define the functions you want in the file, with maybe a main function, and after doing an include, you call the main function (or whichever function you want to try out) with arguments.
Now, if your script already uses command-line arguments (and you don't want to change that), what you can do is assign to the variable that holds them, ARGS, before the include statement:
julia> push!(empty!(ARGS), "arg1")
1-element Vector{String}:
"arg1"
julia> include("main.jl")
Here we empty the ARGS to make sure any previous values are gone, then push the argument (or arguments) we want into it. You can try this out for educational purposes, but if you are new to the language, I would suggest learning and getting used to the more Julian workflow involving function calls that I've mentioned above.
The julia> prompt means your terminal is in Julia REPL mode and is expecting valid Julia code as input. The Julia code main.jl would mean that you want to return the value of a field named jl inside a variable named main. That is why you get that error. The Julia code you would use to run the contents of a file is include("main.jl"). Here the function include is passed the name of your file as a String. This is how you should run files from the REPL.
The instructions you read online are assuming your terminal is in shell mode. This is usually indicated by a $ prompt. Here your terminal is expecting code in whatever language your shell is using e.g. Bash, PowerShell, Zsh. When Julia is installed, it will (usually) add a julia command which works in any shell. The julia command by itself will transform your terminal from shell mode to REPL mode. This julia command can also take additional arguments like filenames. If you use the command julia main.jl in this environment, it will run the file using the Julia program and then exit you back to your terminal shell. This is how you should run files from the terminal shell.
A third way to run Julia files would be to install an IDE like VSCode. Then you can run code from a file with keyboard shortcuts rather than by typing commands.
See the Getting Started Documentation for more information.
Adding to Sundar R's answer, if you want to run script which takes commandline arguments from REPL, you can check this package: https://github.com/v-i-s-h/Runner.jl
It allows you to run you script from REPL with args like:
julia> #runit "main.jl arg1 arg2"
See the README.md for detailed examples.
Hej,
When I try to call QIIME with a system call from R, i.e
system2("macqiime")
R stops responding. It's no problem with other command line programs though.
can certain programs not be called from R via system2() ?
MacQIIME version:
MacQIIME 1.8.0-20140103
Sourcing MacQIIME environment variables...
This is the same as a normal terminal shell, except your default
python is DIFFERENT (/macqiime/bin/python) and there are other new
QIIME-related things in your PATH.
(note that I am primarily interested to call QIIME from R Markdown with engine = "sh" which fails, too. But I strongly suspect the problems are related)
In my experience, when you call Qiime from unix command line, it usually creates a virtual shell of it`s own to run its commands which is different from regular system commands like ls or mv. I suspect you may not be able to run Qiime from within R unless you emulate that same shell or configuration Qiime requires. I tried to run it from a python script and was not successful.
I wanted to run with crontab (the system daemon used to execute desired tasks at certain times) a shiny script.
I first tried running sh Autorun.sh, being in the file:
R
shiny::runApp(...)
but that didn't work
I also tried writting directly Rscript shiny::runApp(...) but it also doesn't work
Any ideas?
To run code using R on shell, you must use the -e option, which stands for expression. The same thing can be done via Rscript.
The correct syntax is then:
R -e 'shiny::runApp(...)'
Care must be taken with the quotes if there are any in the expression being used.
For more information on other command-line options, check An Introduction to R - Appendix B.
I have a CUDA code which I have compiled and have the executable of it. Now I want to call this executable from a R script and pass it arguments also from the R script itself? Is it possible? If yes, please explain how?
To call any external executables you can use the system function:
system("cuda_exe arg1 arg2")
where cuda_exe is the cuda executable, and arg* are the command line arguments passed to the script.
A more cross-platform alternative than system is system2. It'll work on Windows and other systems without a /bin/sh.
system2("cuda_exe", c("arg1", "arg2"))
It requires no shell, but shell syntax like the * glob won't work, and you'll have to learn the R way of doing things, such as list.files(pattern = ".*.csv") instead of just "*.csv". The upshot is that you won't have to fiddle with paste() to construct the command line.
I'm trying to call a script in Tcl with the command:
exec source <script path>
and I get the error
couldn't execute "source": no such file or directory
How can I call another script from tcl?
Edit: I am running a command I got from another person in my office. I was instructed to run "source " explicitly with source. So in other words, how would I run any command that would work in cshell, in Tcl?
If the script you were given is a cshell script, you can exec it like this:
exec /bin/csh $path_to_script
In effect, this is what the 'source' command does from within an interactive shell. It's not clear whether this is really what you want to do or not (not exactly, but close enough for this discussion).
The reason you can't exec the source command is that exec will only work on executable files (hence the name 'exec'). The source command isn't implemented as an exectuable file, it is a command built-in to the shell. Thus, it can't be exec'd.
If you really feel the need to exec the source command or any other built-in command you can do something like this:
exec /bin/csh -c "source $path_to_script"
In the above example you are execing the c shell, and asking it to run the command "source ". For the specific case of the source command, this doesn't really make much sense.
However, I'm not sure any of this will really do what you expect. Usually if someone says "here's some commands, just do 'source ', it usually just defines some aliases and whatnot to be used from within an interactive shell. Those aliases won't work from within Tcl.
source in csh, like . in bash, executes a script without spawning a new process.
The effect is that any variable that is set in that script is available in current csh session.
Actually, source is a built-in command of csh, thus not available from tcl exec, and using exec without source would not give the specific source effect.
There is no simple way to solve your problem.
source load the source file
you should do:
source <script path>
If you want to execute it, then you need to call the main proc.
another option would be to do:
exec [info nameofexecutable] <scritp path>
Some confusion here. exec runs a separate program, possibly with arguments.
source is not a separate program, it is another Tcl command which reads a file of Tcl commands and executes them, but does not pass arguments. If the other script you are trying to call is written to be run on from the command line, it will expect to find its arguments as a list in variable argv. You can fake this by setting argv to the list of arguments before running source, eg.
set argv {first_arg second_arg}
source script_path
Alternatively you could use exec to start a whole separate Tcl executable and pass it the script and arguments:
exec script_path first_arg second_arg
the error speaks for itself. Make sure you give the correct path name, specify full path if necessary. and make sure there is indeed the file exists in that directory
Recently I wanted to set some UNIX environment variables by sourcing a shell script and stumbled across the same problem. I found this simple solution that works perfectly for me:
Just use a little 3-line wrapper script that executes the source command in a UNIX shell before your Tcl script is started.
Example:
#!/bin/csh
source SetMyEnvironment.csh
tclsh MyScript.tcl