Variables

The outputs of Toolshed commands can be stored in named variables using the assignment command =>. Variable names must begin with a $. For example, the following will define a simple int variable and then increment it a couple of times:

> i 1 => $x
1

> i 1 + $x => $x
2

> i 1 + $x => $x
3

The currently defined variables can be listed using the vars command:

> vars
more = ,
x = 4,
self = 3015

The $self and $more variables are special variables defined by the shell. $self points to the player’s current entity, while $more is used if the output of a command is too large to print, in which case the remaining output can be requested by running the more command.

Var Command

If you want to pipe the value stored in a variable into another command, you can use the var command, which effectively just reads out the value of a variable.

e.g.,

> var $x
3

> var $x * 2
6

Val Command

As Toolshed is a strongly typed, parsing a valid command run requires knowing the types of the values that will be returned by a command. Seeing as the contents of a variable may change as a command is executed, this means that some commands may fail to parse. In those instances, you can use the val command instead, though that requires you to explicitly specify the type.

> val int $x
3

> val int $x * 2
6

$marked Variable

Variables don’t necessarily need to be set via => or other Toolshed commands, and could be getting set by other systems. For example, in SS14 there is a “mark” admin verb that assigns an entity to the $marked Toolshed variable, which also has a dedicated marked command for reading out its contents. Though in this case the verb & command are mainly just there for convenience.