AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Perl

Perl has a surprisingly long history on the Macintosh; years before it was present as part of Unix in Mac OS X, it had been ported to the Classic Mac OS by Matthias Neeracher (see http://www.ptf.com/macperl). Modules to form and send Apple events were naturally part of this port (see http://www.ptf.com/macperl/depts/articles/IPCwMP.html). Support for these modules has continued, under the guidance of Chris Nandor, and they are available to Mac OS X users.

Once again, you have a choice: you can form the raw Apple events yourself, using Mac::AppleEvents, or you can use AppleScript terminology through Mac::Glue. The operation of Mac::Glue is similar to Frontier with its glue tables (and is probably deliberately modelled after it); a glue table for a given application must be formed and stored on disk before you can target that application using AppleScript English-like terminology. In order to get started, you will need Mac::Carbon (which includes Mac::AppleEvents) as well as Mac::Glue; on Tiger these are installed by default, but it can't hurt to check for more recent versions.

To make glue, run the gluemac Unix tool. For example:

% sudo /usr/bin/gluemac /Volumes/gromit/Users/matt2/extra/BBEdit\ 8/BBEdit.app
Making glue for '/Volumes/gromit/Users/matt2/extra/BBEdit 8/BBEdit.app'
What is the glue name? [BBEdit]:
Created and installed App glue for 'BBEdit.app, v8.2.3' (BBEdit)

The resulting glue table contains a document in the standard Perl documentation format (POD, for "plain old ...