Is there a Mac OSX equivalent of zenity?

Question

I'm porting some simple X windows/bash scripts to Mac OSX, but I cannot find a build of Zenity (a Gnome app for basic GUI dialogs) for OSX. Is there some other command line driven dialog utility I can use? Basic operations: notification dialog

• List item
• (i.e. basic title, text, icon, OK button)
• error notification
• yes/no or ok/cancel prompts
• select 1 or n items from a list
• input text string

I don't (yet) know AppleScript (but it seems pretty verbose for the file maintenance tasks I'm interested in).

Answer 1

Check out cocoaDialog:

cocoaDialog is an OS X application that allows the use of common GUI controls such as file selectors, text input, progress bars, yes/no confirmations and more with a command-line application. It requires no knowledge of Cocoa, and is ideal for use in shell and Perl scripts (or Ruby, or Python, or... etc).

It's a pretty simple concept — pass arguments to the executable to create a dialog, and it returns a result string. There are some good examples as well as documentation.

Answer 2

Try also Pashua.

Pashua is a tool for creating native Aqua dialog windows from programming languages that have none or only limi­ted support for graphic user inter­faces on Mac OS X. Currently, it supports Apple­Script, Perl, PHP, Python, Groovy, Rexx, Ruby, shell scripts and Tcl—and if your favourite language is not included in this list: writing the glue code for communicating with Pashua is pretty simple.