ShellUtils

The os/ShellUtils module

The entire purpose of the ShellUtils module is to find an executable in the PATH environment variable.

It can be used to implement functionality usually found in the *nix which command-line utility.

For example, to know where autoconf is hiding, one can do:

import os/ShellUtils
file := ShellUtils findExecutable("autoconf")

If the executable is not found, file here will be null. Otherwise, it’ll correspond to the executable first found in the path:

match file {
    case null => "autoconf not found"
    case => "found: %s" format(file path)
} println()

Cross-platform

Adding the .exe suffix is not necessary on Windows - it’ll be added automatically on this platform when searching.

Crucial

findExecutable can be made to throw an exception in case an executable is not found, instead of returning null. For this, pass true as its second argument:

// if we can't find make, don't even bother
make := ShellUtils findExecutable("make", true)