Commands

Idio will look for a external command on your PATH if the expression in functional position evaluates to a symbol (or a string). The arguments to the command should generally be symbols, numbers, strings or lists of those.

Any of the function or arguments can be a variable, so long as it evaluates to a symbol, string, etc..

Other Idio values, eg. #f, have no sensible string form to pass to an external command and the use of them will result in an error.

simple-commands.idio

fn := "foo.txt"
touch fn
ls -l fn

rm fn

$ idio simple-commands
-rw-rw-r--. 1 idf idf 0 Nov 14 13:32 foo.txt

List Arguments

If any of the arguments is a list they will be expanded out (by one level) in situ. This is the only time in Idio where the number of words in the source code differs from the number of words passed as arguments (to the external command):

list-argument.idio

fns := map (function (base) {
  append-string base ".txt"
}) '("foo" "bar" "baz")

printf "fns is %s\n" fns

;; prefix and suffix fns
echo 1 fns 2

$ idio list-argument
fns is ("foo.txt" "bar.txt" "baz.txt")
1 foo.txt bar.txt baz.txt 2

Argument-less Commands

Idio is a programming language first so the use of an external command’s name on its own, without arguments, will result in just the symbol of the command’s name. To force the invocation of the command we must wrap it in parentheses.

We can demonstrate this by having a function return the name of the external command to use:

single-command.idio

define (calculate-cmd) {
  ;; [[ *complex-processing* ]]

  ;; we don't *have* to quote date, here, but it clarifies that cmd
  ;; will evaluate to a symbol
  cmd := 'date

  ;; now return the value of cmd which is just a single variable on
  ;; its own
  cmd
}

to-do := (calculate-cmd)

printf "trying %s\n" to-do
;; this returns the symbol date (to no-one) just like the last
;; expression in calculate-cmd above
to-do

printf "trying (%s)\n" to-do
(to-do)

$ idio single-command
trying date
trying (date)
Mon 14 Nov 13:34:08 GMT 2022

Last built at 2024-05-21T06:11:38Z+0000 from 77077af (dev) for Idio 0.3