stdio.as

This is an ActionScript 3 library and a command-line utility that provides traditional Unix process I/O facilities to Flash programs:

• Read from the standard input stream (stdin).
• Write to the standard output/error streams (stdout/stderr).
• Look at environment variables.
• Prompt the tty interactively using readline.
• Accept command-line arguments.
• Exit with an arbitrary status code.

We also kill those annoying runtime error dialogs; instead, uncaught errors are printed to stderr in a GCC-like syntax. This makes them easy to read, both for programmers, and for our tools (e.g., Emacs).

Implementations are available for both Flex 4 and pure Flash.

Please see the run-swf(1) man page for more information.

Installation

To use this package, you need two things:

• Node.js,
• a standalone Flash Player.

If you are on OS X, you can install Node.js using Homebrew:

$ brew install node

The Flex SDK comes equipped with a standalone Flash Player, located in the runtimes/player directory. If you are on OS X, simply unzip the application and move it to /Applications.