Interacting with the Operating System Using PASS

Introduction

Sheerpower's pass statement lets you run external shell commands from within your program. This is useful for interacting with the operating system, calling utilities, or generating files for use in clusters.

Basic Usage

The pass statement takes a string expression as its argument. This string is sent to the operating system as a shell command. When the pass statement completes, the variable _integer contains the operating system’s exit status.

This example writes a directory listing to a file named listing.txt.

Optional NOWAIT Feature

The pass statement also supports an optional modifier: nowait.

NOWAIT: Runs the command in the background without waiting. Useful for launching external tools without blocking execution.

This launches the Windows calculator and immediately resumes program execution.

Real-World Example: Exporting Chrome Processes to CSV

This example uses the Windows tasklist utility to find all running Chrome processes, saves the output to a CSV file for analysis, and loads it into a Sheerpower cluster for further processing.