Introduction

This package will provide utility functions to make it easier to use the interactive scala interpreter, and also to allow easier scripting with scala

Sample usage

$ scala
Welcome to Scala version 2.6.1-final.
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.

We begin by importing helper, which is the object provided by this package

scala> import helper._
import helper._

helper.exec allows you to execute any command and get back the exit status along with the output

scala> exec ("find ../ -type d -maxdepth 1")
res0: (Int, List[String]) = (0,List(../, ../thunderbird, ../bin, ../man, ../share, ../info, ../lib, ../include, ../argo, ../eclipse, ../google-earth, ../etc, ../plugins, ../phrasebooks, ../examples, ../demos, ../doc, ../translations, ../mkspecs, ../jaxe-source, ../cursor_themes, ../libexec)

As you can see, the result of exec is a tuple that contains the exit code and list containing the output of the process (list of strings terminated with newlines)

scala> res0._2.length
res1: Int = 33

helper.? and helper.?? display information about their argument. ?? is same as ? but more verbose

scala> ?(res0)
scala.Tuple2
------------
hashCode
equals
toString
$tag
productElement
productArity
productPrefix
arity
element
_1
_2
wait
wait
wait
getClass
notify
notifyAll
res2: Any = ()

scala>