The Tcl/Tk project provides an open source, multiplatform, totally free and portable scripting environment that supports string processing and pattern matching, native file system access, shell-like control over other programs, TCP/IP networking, timers, as well as event-driven I/O.
Tcl (Tool Command Language) is easy to learn, allowing the user to create a useful program in minutes. You are free to use Tcl/Tk however you wish, even in commercial applications. While Tcl is the programming language, Tk is the GUI toolkit, which allows developers to design Graphical User Interfaces for their Tcl programs.
Getting started with Tcl/Tk
The Tcl and Tk programs are distributed as two source tarballs (tar archives), so you will have to installed them separately on your GNU/Linux system, if you need them both, of course. The latest versions can be downloaded from Softpedia using the dedicated download section above.
To install either of them, save the sources archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command.
Then, enter the folder of the platform for which you want to optimize and compile the software (e.g. unix), execute the ‘./configure && make’ command, followed by the ‘make install’ command as root or with sudo to install it system wide.
Under the hood and supported operating systems
Both Tcl and Tk program are written mainly in the C programming language. However, it looks like the Tcl language was also used to craft these tools, which are targeted towards developers and system administrators.
Currently, the software run on all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as on various BSD flavors, such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Both 64-bit and 32-bit instruction set architectures are supported at this time.
