[chuck-users] system calls

[Graham Percival]

Greetings,

ChucK is awesome!  I only discovered it slightly a week ago, and I'm a
total convert now.  I can write programs much more elegantly in chuck
than I ever could in pd, and it is _such_ a pleasure to do everything
in text.  Dev team: you guys rock!

I'm working on a chuck->lilypond[1] translator (well, a chuck program 
that
generates lilypond code, gets lilypond to compile it, and then displays
the sheet music).  I was talking about this with Adam Tindale[2], and he
said that ChucK could do system calls.  In the source code for
chuck, I saw a reference to "std.ck", which is supposed to demonstrate
this, but evidently this example file was removed before 1.2 came out.
Could anybody shed more light on this?

[1]  GNU/LilyPond is a notation program that generates beautiful music
from (text) input files; I'm their Documentation Editor.  
http://lilypond.org
[2]  I'm a music undergraduate student at UVic; Adam is the TA for
one of my courses.


Ideally I'd like to be able to output strings to a file and run shell 
commands
(ie "lilypond foo.ly" and "open foo.pdf" -- maybe also "ls foo.pdf" to 
check
if lilypond has finished).  I could do this in pd via the textedit and 
"shell"
external object, but I'd much much rather use chuck.  :)

Cheers,
- Graham Percival