Compiling TCL/TK in Windows

Question

I'm trying to get tcl/tk working in Windows 7 64bit. I've followed the readme on the main tcl's website and what I've done so far is run the make file found in the tcl8.6.1 .zip file you can get off of the tcl website. I was able to compile it with the terminal window in Visual Studio C++ 2010 professional. The make file creates a folder inside your downloaded and extracted tcl folder that you can then run and compile tcl scripts from that specific location but from nowhere else. I want to be able to compile and run tcl scripts from any directory since I'll be doing a bit of tcl/tk programming in the near future.

Stuff I've tried: 1. Copying the tclsh86t.dll file + tclsh86t.exe file to system32 2. Editing the TCL_LIBRARY environment variable but it doesn't exist :/

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I figured it out. In Windows:

1. Open a file explorer
2. Right click on "computer" select "properties"
3. Select "Advanced System Settings"
4. Select "Environment Variables" in the "Advanced" tab.
5. Edit the "Path" variable to have the location of "tclsh86t.exe" available when compiling the latest version of tcl.

When you re-open your command line, you should be able to use tclsh86t.exe from anywhere. In my case, tcl was complaining that it couldn't find a usable init.tcl file. So, I went and grabbed one from the tcl distribution and put it where it was looking and then it was fine. You can alternatively edit your TCL_Library environment variable to point to wherever it is on your PC.