$VAR1 = [
          'osascript',
          '-e',
          'tell application "Finder"
 display dialog "Hello"
 end tell'
        ];

use Data::Dumper;
sub osascript($) { print Dumper(['osascript', map { ('-e', $_) } split(/\r/, $_[0])]); }

When I run it I get:

$VAR1 = [
          'osascript',
          '-e',
          'tell application "Finder"
display dialog "Hello"
end tell'
        ];

That passes the newlines embedded in the command line (which apparently works). But it makes the whole map/split part pointless (since there are no ‘\r’ chars in the string to split on). At that point you may as well just do:

system('osascript', '-e',
'tell application "Finder"
display dialog "Hello"
end tell')

I haven’t seen Mac::Glue before. It looks cool. I don’t have a problem with Apple Events per se—I like the idea of universal API for applications. I just don’t like AppleScript itself. The natural language part of it never set well with me—the whole thing feels hacky. The idea of elevating AppleEvents to native (and fairly idiomatic) Perl is a good one.

I didn’t really think that one through. I’m working on BBEdit 9.6.3 and I have line endings set to Unix (LF) but what is actually in my script is \r. My Perl scripts created on this work on both OSX and various flavours of linux.

The reason I happened upon your page was because I’m doing a project using Mac::Glue. If you are not keen on Applescript or you want to have access to Perl’s text processing power and massive back catalogue of modules, including powerful encryption Mac::Glue is brilliant. Mac::Glue is a Perl Module that allows you to Control Mac apps with Apple event terminology from Perl.

You can write a small Applescript that runs your Perl script all it has to say is:

do shell script “perl /pathto/perlscript.pl”

Your Perl script can then do anything and everything that a Perl script can do and then tell a Mac application to do something with the result.

To completely fix it you could also do:

sub osascript($) { system ‘osascript’, map { (‘-e’, $_) } split(/[\r\n]+/, $_[0]); }

which would handle ‘\n’ (unix), ‘\r’ (old-mac) and ‘\r\n’ (windows) eols. It would also skip blank lines which is probably good too (-e ” would be pointless).

#!/usr/bin/perl

sub osascript($) { system 'osascript', map { ('-e', $_) } split(/\r/, $_[0]); } 

&osascript (
 'tell application "Finder"
 display dialog "Hello"
 end tell'
)

Turns out this is an error from requiring “user interaction” that can be resolved with:

tell application “AppleScript Runner”
display dialog “it works!”
end

This isn’t surprising, since the same applescript code exhibits the same behavior when run from script editor.

However, running just: display dialog “Hello” from Script Editor gives the desired results.

Unfortunately, trying to do the same from perl using the code above just generates the following error:

osascript(41994) malloc: *** error for object 0xa1b1c1d3: Non-aligned pointer being freed
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
2:24: execution error: No user interaction allowed. (-1713)

Any insight?