Get the version of TCL from the command-line?

60
votes

I'm looking for a very straight-forward way of getting the version of the TCL installed on a machine from the command-line. For most programming languages, something along the lines of

languagename -v

provides the information that I want. This does not seem to be an option for tclsh.

The TCL FAQ Q.B21 suggests

echo 'puts $tcl_version;exit 0' | tclsh

but I wonder if there is anything more straight-forward and cross-platform? (I suspect that this would fail mightily on a Microsoft Operating System.)

--

EDIT: Just to emphasize that I'm looking for something that can be executed directly from the operating system command-line. There's all kinds of information available once you start tclsh, but I'm trying to avoid that to ease automated discovery.

3
tcl
If you're also looking for the minor version number, use puts [info patchlevel] instead of puts $tcl_version. Also, you don't explicitly need to exit -- Tcl will see the end of the script and exit on it's own. – glenn jackman
Thanks Glenn. That's useful to know. – Simon Peter Chappell
Would be interesting to know WHY you need the info. Sometimes in Tcl you don't need the info, because STUBS might make any recent (< 12 years) old Tcl acceptable. – schlenk
Perfectly reasonable question. I was wondering about the practicality of automating the recording of the programming language version numbers used by my program (bitbucket.org/simonpeter/zadok) as it uses so many different languages that it could get quite time consuming determining the version numbers manually. I had done pretty well figuring out the other languages, but TCL is new to me and tclsh doesn't play like the others do. – Simon Peter Chappell
tclsh CLI API is horrendous! – Ciro Santilli 新疆再教育营六四事件法轮功郝海东

3 Answers

53
votes

This might sound too simplistic, but if you made a script file that contained the commands:

puts $tcl_version

And then ran tclsh sillyscript.tcl, that would execute on all platforms, assuming binary is in PATH. It certainly isn't fancy or flashy, or even neat, but it satisfies that requirement AFAIK.

====

I got curious, so I tried it and without the quotes:

echo puts $tcl_version;exit 0 | tclsh

Executes just fine on my windows box... maybe platform detection prior to the TCL detection is an option?

26
votes

you can do this too.

bash-3.2$ tclsh
% puts $tcl_version
8.6
% info patchlevel
8.6.0

but the best way i think is through echo.

echo 'puts [info patchlevel];exit 0' | tclsh
echo 'puts $tcl_version;exit 0' | tclsh

=======

weird when i tried with out the quotes it didn't work for me. running Mac osx

11
votes

Depending on your shell, it could be:

tclsh <<< 'puts [info patchlevel]'