From a Praat script you can call system commands. These are the same commands that you would normally type into a terminal window or into the Window command line prompt.

system command

executes a system command.

Some system commands are identical on all platforms (Macintosh, Windows, Unix):

which creates a new directory sounds in the directory of the script. Some other system commands are different on different platforms. For instance, to throw away all WAV files in the script's directory, you would write

on Windows, but

on Macintosh and Unix.

The script will stop running if a system command returns an error. For instance,

will stop the script if the directory sounds already exists. In order to prevent this, you can tell Praat to ignore the return value of the system command:

system_nocheck command

executes a system command, ignoring any errors.

Thus, to make sure that the directory sounds exists, you would write

environment$ (symbol-string)

returns the value of an environment variable, e.g.

stopwatch

returns the time that has elapsed since the previous stopwatch.

Here is a Praat script that measures how long it takes to do a million assignments:

Links to this page

• Scripting
• Scripting 6. Communication outside the script