CODEWITHSUNDEEP
command-linescriptingwolfram-mathematica
dreeves
dreeves

Reputation: 26932

Call a Mathematica program from the command line, with command-line args, stdin, stdout, and stderr

If you have Mathematica code in foo.m, Mathematica can be invoked with -noprompt and with -initfile foo.m (or -run "<<foo.m") and the command line arguments are available in $CommandLine (with extra junk in there) but is there a way to just have some mathematica code like

#!/usr/bin/env MathKernel
x = 2+2;
Print[x];
Print["There were ", Length[ARGV], " args passed in on the command line."];
linesFromStdin = readList[];
etc.

and chmod it executable and run it? In other words, how does one use Mathematica like any other scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc)?

Upvotes: 18

Views: 13328

Answers (6)

dreeves
dreeves

Reputation: 26932

MASH -- Mathematica Scripting Hack -- will do this.

Since Mathematica version 6, the following perl script suffices:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves/mash/mash.pl

For previous Mathematica versions, a C program is needed:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves/mash/pre6

UPDATE: At long last, Mathematica 8 supports this natively with the "-script" command-line option:

http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/mathematica-shell-scripts/

Upvotes: 11

Ivan Lopes
Ivan Lopes

Reputation: 31

For mathematica 7

$ cat test.m
#!/bin/bash
MathKernel -noprompt -run < <( cat $0| sed -e '1,4d' )  | sed '1d'
exit 0
### code start Here ... ###
Print["Hello World!"]
X=7
X*5

Usage:

$ chmod +x test.m

$ ./test.m
"Hello World!"

7
35

Upvotes: 1

Antimony
Antimony

Reputation: 2240

I found another solution that worked for me.

Save the code in a .m file, then run it like this: MathKernel -noprompt -run “<

This is the link: http://bergmanlab.smith.man.ac.uk/?p=38

Upvotes: 2

mcandre
mcandre

Reputation: 24602

Assuming you add the Mathematica binaries to the PATH environment variable in ~/.profile,

export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Mathematica.app/Contents/MacOS

Then you just write this shebang line in your Mathematica scripts.

#!/usr/bin/env MathKernel -script

Now you can dot-slash your scripts.

$ cat hello.ma
#!/usr/bin/env MathKernel -script

Print["Hello World!"]

$ chmod a+x hello.ma
$ ./hello.ma
"Hello World!"

Tested with Mathematica 8.0.

Minor bug: Mathematica surrounds Print[s] with quotes in Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. WTF?

Upvotes: 5

sakra
sakra

Reputation: 65781

Here is a solution that does not require an additional helper script. You can use the following shebang to directly invoke the Mathematica kernel:

#!/bin/sh
exec <"$0" || exit; read; read; exec /usr/local/bin/math -noprompt "$@" | sed '/^$/d'; exit
(* Mathematica code starts here *)
x = 2+2;
Print[x];

The shebang code skips the first two lines of the script and feeds the rest to the Mathematica kernel as standard input. The sed command drops empty lines produced by the kernel.

This hack is not as versatile as MASH. Because the Mathematica code is read from stdin you cannot use stdin for user input, i.e., the functions Input and InputString do not work.

Upvotes: 6

Lev
Lev

Reputation: 6657

Try
-initfile filename
And put the exit command into your program

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions