shell

Jeremy's icon

This first post will always contain a link to the latest version of shell.

Shell is a cross-platform object for Max with which you can execute terminal commands. The shell object spawns a new shell process, executes the desired commands and passes stdout (and optionally stderr) back to Max.

Latest version: https://github.com/jeremybernstein/shell/releases/tag/1.0b3

Release notes (1.0b3):
- escape backslashes in output
- arm64 (Apple Silicon) fat binary on macOS
- 32-bit version removed on macOS
- this is the final release with a 32-bit external for Windows

Release notes (1.0b2):
- OSX: @forkmode now permits switching between fork (default, SSH-compatible) and vfork (better performance under some circumstances)
- OSX: SSH works again (if using fork(), see above)
- Windows: fixes for single-byte code pages on non-ANSI systems
- Windows: Fix for incomplete (prompt) output for Unicode commands.

Release notes (1.0b1):
- c++11 rewrite (no functional change)
- OSX: change fork() to vfork() to improve performance and minimize interruption when forking.
- OSX: reset signal masks in the forked process
- update Windows projects for Visual Studio 2015

DiGiTaLFX's icon

Thanks for keeping this object alive Jeremy, was just wondering why some of my old patches weren't working until I figured out that aka.shell didn't support 64-bit CPUs.

Anyway, thought I'd point out that I came across this page via https://cycling74.com/tools/bernstein-shell/ which links to the old forum thread first. Nearly downloaded the 2017 version until I decided to skim through the whole page first and found the link to here. Might be worth updating the links :)

Rob Ramirez's icon

thanks for the note, I've updated the link on the tool page.

Ahti Ta's icon

Does anyone know how to close/quit a specific application or file that is currently open? Via shell (or otherwise if possible).

I'm on windows and I'm able to open the file or application via shell by just sending the directory of it to shell, but would like to be able to close it as well. Tried pkill but that does not seem to take extra arguments.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Source Audio's icon

taskkill or tskill is windows equivalent of unix pkill

To forcefully kill only this process

taskkill /IM SomeApp.exe /F

To forcefully kill this process and any child processes started by it
taskkill /IM SomeApp.exe /T /F

Thomas's icon

Thank's for this beautiful object !
On os x 10.13 ssh doesn't work (on my computer)
but on my other computer 10.9 it works fine

any ideas ? Thank's

Torsten Belschner's icon

Thanks for the great and highly useful shell object.

On Win 10, shell.mxe64 (as of Oct 25 2018) in Max8.0.2 cannot be used on systems set to Asian languages when commands return Asian characters, though.
For example on Korean systems:
$ ipconfig /all
crashes Max reliably as the returned data contains Korean characters.
The 20170717 shell version behaves the same, as does shell.2018 on Japanese localizations.

Looking into this would be highly appreciated.

Thanks!!

Julien Vincenot's icon

Hi all,

Did anyone on Windows try to control other programming languages from the new shell object?

I develop a pedagogical package called MOZLib, dedicated to computer aided composition and that works as an introduction to the bach & cage packages

A big part of it uses SBCL (www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html) to reactualize composition techniques developed on PatchWork, OpenMusic and PWGL in the 1980s-2000s.
It work beautifully on Mac, but I never had the occasion to test it on PC since Windows 10.

If someone is interested to give me a hand with this, it would be fantastic. I'm planning for a first release around April.

Thanks,

Julien

Jeremy's icon

Anyone on OSX who is having SSH issues, please try this version: https://expr-i0.net/shell_ssh.zip

There is a new attribute @forkmode. For the previous release, shell was forking with 'vfork' in order to eliminate CPU spikes encountered in (for instance) Live when executing certain kinds of scripts. 'vfork' is useful for this, but disables SIGTTOU and SIGTTIN signals in the child process which are used for interactive input in ssh. You can now select either 'fork' (default, works with ssh) or 'vfork' (less overhead when forking, won't work for ssh), and because it's an attribute, you can change it on the fly depending on your needs.

For in-box usage, @forkmode 0 = fork, @forkmode 1 = vfork.

This is OSX-only (the attribute is invisible on Windows and has no effect). If I can get some feedback, I'll roll the changes into an updated release above.

Torsten Belschner's icon

Coming back to the difficulties using shell on Win10 with Asian character sets which should be resolved asap.

Setting Win10 to e.g. Korean (and back) is just 2 steps:
- in Win10 Settings/Time&Language, select Region&language, click Add a language, select Korean, in the Korean field click the Options button and DL the typing pack, click Set as default
- right-click the Start menu, open Powershell in Admin mode, type "Set-WinSystemLocale ko-KR"
- reboot

- in command type e.g. "ipconfig /all"; you should see Asian characters in the output
- open shell.maxhelp and send the same command, over here Max8 crashes

- to get back to English: in Win10 Settings select English, click Set as default
- open Powershell in Admin mode, type "Set-WinSystemLocale en-US"
- reboot

Thanks for setting this straight.

Torsten

Jeremy's icon

Torsten, it's a free, unsupported and (if you want to try figuring it out yourself) open-source external. I certainly understand your frustration, but it will be resolved when there's time to devote to setting up a system for korean and figuring out the problem. A much more common and pressing issue -- broken SSH on OSX -- took a couple of months to get around to, so thanks for your patience.

That all said, thanks for the reproduction steps, which will help with the above. Not sure when I'll be able to look at it, though.

Torsten Belschner's icon

Sure, perfectly understood.
Thanks again for the great object and your support.

Jeremy's icon

@torsten, please test https://expr-i0.net/shell_win_190219.zip and let me know how it goes. Turned out to be a pretty annoying issue involving non-Unicode, single-bytes Windows code pages (charsets). Seems to be working for me now.

Torsten Belschner's icon

Tested shell_win_190219.mxe64 on Win10.
- shell works on en-US system as before
- when set to ko-KR (Korean) as described above shell processes Asian characters without the slightest hitch
- tested commands: ipconfig /all, arp -a, getmac, ping /n 1 localhost

Thanks, Jeremy!

- of no significance, just for the record, sending the command "date" to shell prints the output twice; then shell does not react to any further commands. Same behavior on both Win10 en-US and ko-KR. And same behavior as in the previous (1.0b1) version of shell.

Jeremy's icon

@torsten, good call on 'date', there was a bug in handling incomplete (e.g. prompt) lines in Unicode output. Will be fixed in the next one, which will be posted to github momentarily.

sandcobainer~'s icon

Long shot, but did anyone figure out how to use virtual environment with Python under shell?

ironside's icon

I've been trying to trigger some npm code which works fine in Terminal, but I get no response in shell. Might there be some issue where I have to load dependencies or something (it works from scratch in Terminal)?

pure's icon

how would I form a message if I need to send my user password to shell? RTFM link is fine, too.

Source Audio's icon

example on OSX
echo 'pass' | sudo -S mkdir ~/AAA

That will make folder named AAA on desktop with admin pass
pass is Your password
| between pass and sudo is vertical slash , ascii 124

pure's icon

thanks, creating a directory works. would you know why this doesn't work for me:
echo 'password' | sudo spctl --master-disable

i also tried:
sudo spctl --master-disable
and then in a separate message:
echo 'password'

Source Audio's icon

try :
echo 'pass' | sudo -S spctl --master-disable

pure's icon

didnt work

Source Audio's icon

I had no High Sierra at hand to confirm that above message to shell works,
but now I tested it and it works as expected.
Enabling / disabling gatekeeper works.
So You must have some other problem.
I used last published shell version at the top of this thread.

pure's icon

ok good to know. i will find it eventually. it'll just take some time as i am a terminal dork. i will report my findings.

Source Audio's icon

Maybe You have system integrity protection (SIP) enabled ?
You can test things using Terminal first, and if it works there,
than it should also in shell.

pure's icon

helvete-6:~ pureold$ csrutil status
System Integrity Protection status: enabled.

'spctl --master-disable' alwaysworks in the terminal but not through shell. I haven't found the right way to send my pwd and 'spctl --master-disable' in one message to the shell.

Source Audio's icon

if password is AAA123

echo 'AAA123' | sudo -S spctl --master-disable

This works for me

pure's icon

this is precisely what doesn't work for me. that's my problem

Source Audio's icon

I can't explain it, I do have SIP disabled though, but I don't think that
turning gatekeeper off requires SIP to be disabled.

Jeremy's icon

This is working for me, and is no different than what you're trying to do.

$ csrutil status
System Integrity Protection status: enabled.
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Source Audio's icon

What has to be mentioned is that if one sends sudo message to shell
without providing the password, shell will wait forever for the password input,
and will not execute any commands.
One has to close and reopen patch, sometimes even restart max
to get it going again.
To confirm that password is set correctly send this to shell:
echo 'pass' | sudo -S whoami ( put correct password in)
should output root
message whoami should output user name
----------
Is the password the problem ?
Try temporary changing the password to something simple,
like a single letter, just to make sure, and avoid spaces.
And don't use terminal and max with shell at same time.
sudo -K command can be used in terminal to clear password
cache which gets stored after initial entry for a limited time.
Don't know what else to suggest to troubleshoot the problem

jon281092's icon

Hi Jeremy! Great work with this shell object! Really saved my day :)
I would simply suggest an update: adding alias.
I was trying to run this in order to test something like firmware updates directly from a Max patch.
Using the alias method on the shell was simply not reacting (no errors, but also not uploading the arduino file).
I was able to do it replacing the alias with the file path.
Although this is fine for me, I can imagine some people running into troubles if they have huge file paths for their implementations.
Anyway...great job!
Thank you

Jeremy's icon

Hi, every time you send a command to 'shell', it's creating a new login shell, so you don't have persistence (or crosstalk, if you like) between invocations. You can probably add that alias to your .bashrc such that it works every time you use 'shell', although I haven't tested it. Glad the object is working for you!

Sean Norris's icon

Hello,
I'm trying to launch some Processing patches via the shell object using the command line installation of Processing. However, the shell object shows no reaction to the command "processing-java" or to full commands like "processing-java --sketch=<filepath> --run". It also didn't print anything in reaction to "processing-java --help". All other commands have been working fine ("echo", "pwd", etc. all printed expected results).
The workaround that I thought of was to store the processing launch command in a .sh file, and launch the .sh via the shell object, but I can't seem to get any .sh files to launch either.
Any recommendations on what to look into? Is this even possible via the shell object?
This object has otherwise served me very well in the past!
Thanks

EDIT-September 9:
Okay, I think the main issue was message formatting in Max. I've gotten shell to successfully launch shell scripts by opening them in Terminal. (open -a Terminal \"<path-to-.sh-file>\") passed as a message into shell opens a terminal window and runs the script. Not a perfect solution but it works.
Another possibility is to export all of the Processing sketches as applications, and launch them using the "open" command in a similar way.

mahoku's icon

HI Jeremy-
i am trying to us the shell object to convert some video files automatically in Max - and when i feed the following line into a terminal window (on a mac) - it works fine - but when i try this ins MAX then i get no response - and for the life of me i cant figure out why... does shell not work with ffmpeg? or is there some other reason that i just dont see? i am passing the following line as a message to the shell object:
ffmpeg -i /Users/OP/Desktop/Top_View_Camera/20191024_S3_EQ_OHD_Trial01.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy /Users/OP/Desktop/Top_View_Camera/20191024_S3_EQ_OHD_Trial01.mp4

any suggestions are greatly appreciated !
thx

Matthias

Source Audio's icon

send full path to ffmpeg binary to shell.
And use slash based path.

mahoku's icon

Thank you Source Audio! ;) solved my problem! ;) greatly appreciated!!

mahoku's icon

now i do have another question that i cant seem to solve:
shell is calling a new terminal session each time a message is sent to it - i get that -this means that i cant call a for loop in terminal as a usually would since each line would call a new terminal. if i want to convert the above mentioned mkv videos to Mp4 videos - then i was thinking i could (since the number of videos created will vary dependent on the numbers of trials) read the folder with the folder object and then selected ONLY the mkv flies to process - but i cant seem to find how to filter the list only to *.mkv - the selectable type does not include mkv file - so how do i just search for a text tring and use that as filter ? the individual names of the file wikll change of course - so i want to pass each individual file name to the shell object for conversion via ffmpeg.
what am i missing?

thx

Matthias

Source Audio's icon

You need to add .mkv filetype to Max filetypes
in order to be able to filter that type of file in umenu
autopopulate, dropfile filetype etc.
Either add a line in max-fileformats.txt which is the best option,
max fileformat .mkv MKVF 0 Video moviefile;
or by loadbanging a message :
;
max fileformat .mkv MKVF

What I don't know what 4 char id should be used for that type of file,
maybe MKVF would do.
Adding a line in max-formats.txt is a better option, because
it will work form the first max start.
Doing this by message from max standalone, would need
standalone restart to make new filetype active.

Source Audio's icon

P.S. of course You could build a full list of found items,
and then copy only *.mkv files to a new list,
doing some regex or similar, but that's
not prefered way.

mahoku's icon

Hey Source Audio -
great - did not know that i could edit the list of file types - i will try that! ;)

thX

keepsound's icon

Another simpler question.... how to send the press ENTER request appearing in the max Console?? penter alone doesn't work... Thx - Italo

penter

Source Audio's icon

penter needs a password entered.
man perl needs no password .
I don't know what exactly You are trying to do.
If You send any message that requests password,
You send penter xy, xy = password.

Jeremy's icon

@keepsound 'penter' is working for me with the perl docs, or man pages in general.

keepsound's icon

Hi, first of all, many thanks for your answers and interest.
@source audio: I don't have to send passwords and I know how to do it. Here I have only to send ENTER (I guess penter, and it's not working. I'm not speaking about Pearl but about Man and what is then coming out to the Max Console
@Jeremy: penter alone is not working for me with man (I've write man Pearl as example, can be any, man cp, man mkdir, man rm etc). In the Terminal window the info is complete, in Max you have to send ENTER to show the next row.

Most of all I need a url with more infos about penter, but there's not any....

keepsound's icon

Found by myself, maybe can be useful for anyone: send a argument to the shell obj as "stderr 1", then penter will work. See picture

Source Audio's icon

Fine that it finally works for You.
I am using older version of shell (2017) max and OS.
It works differently than new one, and also depends on OS.
So as You say, one has to try & error till it does what one wants.

keepsound's icon

Yes, you can download the new vers too. The new vers is 8.0.0 and works also on older Max and OS versions.

pure's icon

I am trying to retrieve the name of the wifi network i am connected with through [shell]. this command works in the terminal:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport -I | awk -F: '/ SSID/{print $2}'
sending this message into the shell object gives me back "0".
does anyone know what I am doing wrong?

Source Audio's icon

Try this :

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

pure's icon

@source audio
your patch gives me this:
print: agrCtlRSSI:
print: agrExtRSSI:
print: agrCtlNoise:
print: agrExtNoise:
print: state:
print: op
print: lastTxRate:
print: maxRate:
print: lastAssocStatus:
print: 802.110000
print: link
print: BSSID:
print: SSID:
print: MCS:
print: channel:

but no info.

OSX 10.13.4
i am connected to an android 6 phone hotspot right now. will try at home later.

Source Audio's icon

I am having clear output with all values, but
I run it on snow leopard.

pure's icon

you are on 10.6??? wow....
it seems that [shell] is often not accepting the same messages as the terminal although it is supposed to do so. is there any place where i can read/learn about this?

john smith's icon

  • Thanks again for the great object and your support.

Jeremy's icon

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport -I | awk -F: '/ SSID/{print \$2}' works for me. You need to escape the $ in $2 because $2 is a reserved term in message box.

pure's icon

sending "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport -I" in the terminal gives me all the info

pure's icon

"success"!!!! i found an older [shell] from 17 july 2017 (version 7.3.4) which does work!
let's hope we caught jeremy's attention by now to get a fix or at least an explanation =)

pure's icon

@jeremy - read your post too late....
i tried with shell 8.0.0 and it works! thanks for the help.

can the same thing be done with shell on windows? probably needs a completely different message?

Jeremy's icon

OK, the problem in @Source Audio's patch is that shell outputs its result as a list (it used to output each line as a single symbol in the past, you can re-enable that behavior with the @symout). So the data is being altered by fromsymbol (which only reads the first item in the list and ignores the 2nd item (the name you want)).

The awk issue is the escaped $, as I mentioned earlier.

So this works for me, and should work for you:

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

As for Windows, well, that's what the internet's for, right? I used an obscure tool called Google and found: https://superuser.com/questions/1124659/how-can-i-use-cmd-to-find-out-to-which-wifi-network-i-am-connected/1124661 . You'll need to try it yourself, though.

pure's icon

yeah - i just figured out the tosymbol trap in source audio's patch this very second.
google is indeed an interesting tool. thanks for bringing it to my attention. will give it a try soon and report back if it's useful for anything at all!

Source Audio's icon

What makes it a bit difficult is that both shell version and OS version
come into play, so one needs to experiment a bit to get the wished result.
Inserting print or capture is allways helpfull to find out what's going on.
in older shell escaping \$2 simply does not work ...

Julien Vincenot's icon

Hi,

This is a question mostly for Jeremy, but anyone who has an idea is very welcome !
As I wrote already before on this page I use the shell object intensively for 5 years now, to evaluate Lisp code generated on the fly in Max (+ bach) with SBCL. It works beautifully (and extremely fast), thank you so much again Jeremy for keeping the project alive, I really depend on it ! :) Now the system I call PWforMax is part of my main research project, and distributed freely inside the MOZ'Lib package for computer-aided / algorithmic composition : http://julienvincenot.com/?page_id=235

My question concerns performance of the shell object when printing from stdout and/or stderr to the Max window. I am now porting to Max a powerful, polyphonic music constraint solver (written in Lisp by Örjan Sandred) that in a certain debug/verbose mode prints every n cycles of a search to stdout. This is very useful to identify where and why the solver would struggle to return a result with specific search-space and rules.

I noticed in that case that the shell object seems to struggle and return those printed messages kind of all at the same time (by grapes of 60 lines every 5 to 15 seconds), sometimes it even waits until the end of evaluation before returning anything. In pure lisp, from the terminal, it prints everything at constant pace, which is a bit more readable.

Any idea why? I imagine this might be a "feature" or voluntary limitation (like a speedlim...) in the bridge between Max and shell? This is very much a cosmetic problem, it looks clunky but does the job VERY well :)

Thanks for the help !
All the best,

Julien

MMa's icon

Hi again Jeremy! On macos I'm noticing a particular anomaly. After sending a command to the shell at the start of a patch of max to start a program, when I try to save the same max file that I am working on and which contains the shell module it does not make me save the max file in the same folder but redirects it to another directory automatically. Surely this is not a bug but it is my problem of little knowledge of the terminal. Do you know how to solve this problem? Thanks

keepsound's icon

The normal place to save some files is the preferences folder of the app itself, located in the library/application support/name_of_the_folder_that_you_give_it_preferences....path to rename in the standalone obj of your project. And it’s better you give it a name, otherwise the folder will created inside the Cicling’74 preferences folder and overwrite others (that should not be present...). My 2 cents...

keepsound's icon

...and don’t save inside your bundle, otherwise the app can’t be notharized.

Jeremy's icon

@mma I'm not sure I understand your report. You mean, when you try to save the patcher, the Save As... dialog is opening to a folder you're not expecting? Or you mean you are choosing Save, and Max is automatically saving a copy of the file to a different location than the file you're saving? I honestly have no idea what would cause the latter, and would need to see a patcher exhibiting it. If it's the former, I might have some ideas, but I'd probably still need a patcher.

Konstantin's icon

Friends, there is an AppleScript

tell application "System Events" set the props to get the properties of the front window of application process "Finder" set theSBounds to {size, position} of props end tell

please help to execute it and get the data using the shell

Roman Thilenius's icon
Source Audio's icon

that is not apple script.
You can't simply write any gibberish into script.
From what you posted one can not even get idea what you want to achieve with it.
If you only wrote in plain text something like :
I want to tell finder to change position of it's frontmost window...

if you have working apple script, next burden is convert that into
osascript formated shell message, including all
max created traps because of escaping chars, etc etc

here is one example to get you on the right path:

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.


Jeremy's icon

@КОНСТАНТИН КАЗАНЦЕВ: this works from the Terminal

$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events"' -e 'set the props to get the properties of the front window of application process "Finder"' -e 'return {size, position} of props' -e 'end tell'
> 997, 570, 206, 67

and in fact, this Max patcher works for me:

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Jeremy's icon

@mma there are a few objects in this patcher which I don't have:

newobj: auto_restart-sleep: No such object
newobj: dsp_state: No such object
newobj: send_osc: No such object
newobj: init_audio_interface: No such object

and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do to reproduce the problem. Can you try to reduce it an absolute minimum and add instructions?

MMa's icon

auto_restart-sleep contains the curtain object;
dsp_state, send_osc, init_audio_interface I did not include them voluntarily to have a focus on the subpatch that contains the shell object ..

Konstantin's icon

@JEREMY: Thank you very much, now it works very well. I am very grateful to you!!!! The shell object really needs detailed instructions and a large help file.

Julien Vincenot's icon

@Jeremy

Hello !
With a collaborator we're trying to get UNIX applications (SBCL lisp implementation) to be controlled by Max in Windows 10 through the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL), as is already possible on Mac very easily (see my posts on MOZLib above)

We managed to run SBCL unix executable after unlocking WSL (on Ubuntu terminal as shown in screen shot).

Now what we can't figure out is if the Windows version of the shell object would allow to interact with that Unix layer, or if it only has access to the PowerShell "layer" and syntax.

Unfortunately the help file available doesn't provide much info on the distinction between Mac shell (Unix) and Windows shell (PowerShell or Unix), so we could really use some of your guidance here :)

Thanks in advance for your help !

Julien

Matteo Marson's icon

@Jeremy

Hi, I'm following what Julien just posted. Here are two screenshots to better explain where we're stuck:

sbcl runs fine on the windows machine

as I try to launch it from the shell object nothing happens

Thanks in advance!

Jeremy's icon

The Windows shell is CMD, not PowerShell at the moment.

Julien Vincenot's icon

Hi Jeremy
Thanks for the fast reply, that clarifies our first misunderstanding.
I don't have a Windows machine with me to verify it, but my next best guess is using the "wsl" prefix command to interact indirectly with the Unix shell — supposedly it works from both classic CMD and PowerShell.
If you have any other idea that might help, I'm very interested ! I might come back to you after we test things out with Matteo. Thanks again !
Best

maybites's icon

Hi

I am struggling with [shell] on windows 10.

I want to start ultragrid (a video streaming CLI app -> ultragrid.cz) with [shell], which works just fine.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.


but I am struggling with stopping it. 'pkill' will stop the process to output data to the max-console, but the process keeps running in the background.

while it is possible to kill it with 'taskkill /IM uv.exe /F', without knowing the processid it will kill all running ultragrid processes. And I need to run multiple of those processes (each inside its own [shell] objects).

I wonder if there is a way to get the process id when starting a process within [shell]. Or any other way to achieve my goal.

cheers

keepsound's icon

Never attempt to do that in win, but in osx yes... I think the system is perhaps the same, the cmd should be different, You can take inspiration....

Source Audio's icon

tasklist ?

maybites's icon

@sourceaudio: with tasklist I get the PID from all the task, but I need the one I started inside the [shell].

@keepsound: does this patch also work with windows 10?

Source Audio's icon

You should maybe get more precise about that "different" processes.
Are You starting same exe several times ?
Why don't you simply duplicate and rename the exe file ?
uv1.exe, uv2.exe etc

maybites's icon

Are You starting same exe several times ?

yes, thats the idea.

Why don't you simply duplicate and rename the exe file ?
uv1.exe, uv2.exe etc

not the most elegant, but that's actually workable hack, thanks :-)

Source Audio's icon

Talking about elegant way, why don't you control that one exe in a better way ?
Is is it not able to provide and control multi streams ?
Don't know much about that app that you use, but I would first check if that is possible.

maybites's icon

Don't know much about that app that you use, but I would first check if that is possible.

I need to run it in different processes.

Source Audio's icon

Don't have win machine at hand now to test , but remeber start process command
like
start "Stream1" path and parameters
start "Stream2" path and parameters
etc
then :
taskkill /FI "WindowTitle eq Stream1*" /T /F
taskkill /FI "WindowTitle eq Stream1*" /T /F
Could you try that ?
You also have option to write scripts and run them from max using launchbrowser messages
just an idea

maybites's icon

Thanks - That would work.
However, the ultragrid-CLI outputs status messages I would like to parse, and running it inside the [shell] I can get them to parse inside max, while using 'start' opens a new 'cmd' window where they are unreachable.

I am tinkering with

1. copy uv.exe uv0.exe
2. uv0.exe <parameters>
3. pkill
3. taskkill /IM "uv0.exe" /F
4. del uv0.exe

where each instance will get its own index. but it is not ideal either.

Source Audio's icon

I would keep copies of the exe file, why copy and delete ?

You can also try to capture log events into max,
I am not sure if shell can deal with it, last I remember is powershell
get-eventlog, but maybe there are options for cmd based event capture, like
wevtutil.exe - is that one still arround on windows 10 ?

Julien Vincenot's icon

Hi

This is a follow-to my message posted here in May 2020 about how slow shell prints stdout / stderr during longer evaluations.
I encountered this problem clearly today when running this constraint solver in Lisp. I took a video to demonstrate the problem, I will leave it on google drive :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K8NCHktKNCj9RBnBgnnG8wd2sQ7Qu5yK/view?usp=sharing

I realized it slows down Max dramatically, even if its output is connected to nothing.
As you see the sbcl process is not so heavy in the terminal,
I cannot understand why it would become so unstable in Max, as most of the calculations happen in the SBCL process.

Do you have any idea of how I could solve this? Of course I am available if you want to do some live testing on Zoom or else.
thanks !

Julien

Jeremy's icon

Hi @Julien, maybe you can post a complete patcher with setup instructions. I suspect this is just an interaction with the Max Console. As you mentioned, the actual work is happening in a different process.

Julien Vincenot's icon

Hi Jeremy,

Of course, is there a way to reach you directly to send you the files?
It requires a package that is not completely ready for release.
Otherwise I need a little more time to reproduce it more lightly, let me know.
Thanks !

Jeremy's icon

jeremy at cycling74 dot com

Julien Vincenot's icon

Thanks ! I'll prepare the example

fraction's icon

hi
Im on mac os mojave.
trying the command "pkill -x TextEdit" for instance, and it doesnt work, while working from Terminal.
console say extra arguments for message "pkill"
Do i miss something?
thx!