I have some scripts that run in Windows, and the ability to put a GUI
layer over them is kind of appealing. So when I stumbled over
http://wizapp.sourceforge.net/ I thought that was rather cute.
(Reading the "advanced batch scripting" art of the manual impresses upon me that no sane person should write Windows batch scripts, however. :-) )

I believe wizapp should work fine from under any Unix environment for Windows (Cygwin, UWin, SFU, etc.), with maybe one obvious trick needed.

Then I went looking and found a nice paper on using GUI equivalents to
shell components for teaching shell programming to students, at
http://jan.netcomp.monash.edu.au/xsc...gramming2.html
and that seemed cute too.

So I wondered whether there was a minimalist extension like wizapp that
would be available as a single command (you give wizapp various options
to tell it what kind of GUI panel to look like), so that you could
write portable GUI shell scripts. E.g. if wizapp were ported to X/Unix, the scripts would be portable. That'd be one solution.

I know many people will say "Just use Tk/Tcl", but that suffers from two
problems: each new version breaks all previous scripts; and I don't know
the language; and it's lower level than shell scripting (it's similar to
http://www.satisoft.com/satshell/: see the code for the /etc/passwd demo:
http://www.satisoft.com/examples/sat...iewpasswd.html to see what I
mean); and Tk/Tcl represents a hefty install on every target system (wizapp is just the single executable); and I can't count. :-)


luke

how about using dtksh - at least under Solaris' /usr/dt/bin/dtksh
sorry if you're talking only about Windows....

Sorry, I should have made it clearer when I was talking about wanting portable GUI shell scripts, I meant *really* portable - all Unices and Windows too (via Cygwin or UWin or whatever).

dtksh otherwise would sound good, though I note this worrying quote at http://users.tpg.com.au/adsln4yb/dtkshdemos.html: "dtksh does not appear well maintained across different OSes". It does also seem to require X11, and for Windows portability you'd prefer an abstraction from the native windowing system.

Same problem applies to tksh (except that I don't think tksh is available for Windows at all).
http://www.research.att.com/~gsf/dow...open.html#tksh
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jlk/tksh/

A multi-purpose moderately flexible tool like the wizapp thing would handle 95% of cases. If it was built from something like tksh you'd have the flexibility to do the remaining 95%. :-) But installing tksh across a heterogeneous network of 100's of PCs running varying OSes sounds painful.

luke