GUI Shell

The Common Desktop Environment includes Desktop Korn shell, an interpreted scripting language alternative to C programming of the Motif toolkit. Desktop Korn shell includes selected frequently-used Common Desktop Environment, Xt, and Xlib APIs. You must use a compiled language to access the full power of the environment. However, you can write Desktop Korn shell scripts that participate in desktop integration activities such as drag and drop, session management, and ToolTalk messaging.

If you are comfortable with shell programming, you may prefer to use Desktop Korn shell for modest programming tasks because it is:

• Well suited to system-administration-type applications because the shell commands intermix easily with GUI control.

• Good for putting a GUI control program on top of character-based applications because the shell environment handles character-based interaction in a natural way.

• A good way to deliver instruction-set-independent programs to a heterogeneous collection of hosts. For example, use the Common Desktop Environment Mailer to attach a script to a message that the recipient simply double-clicks to invoke.