How to run JavaScript using jsc on OS X?

Question

I got this when I was trying to find some way to run my JavaScript programs through terminal. The run and load command mentioned can execute external J

Answer 1

Complements of this post, JSC lives at

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/jsc

and is not in the shell PATH by default. You can fix that with

ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/jsc /usr/local/bin

jsc takes filenames as arguments. You could run a file named demo.js with

jsc demo.js

Note that you'll have to use debug() instead of the conventional console.log() in your script to see any output.

Answer 2

NOTE for MacOS Catalina (10.15.x) users

jsc now lives on a new path:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/Helpers/jsc

Make that adjustment to @hurrymaplelad's instructions and you'll be good to go.

Answer 3

You're not very clear on what sort of programs these scripts are. Do they do local tasks (e.g. interact with the local file system)? Or are they web scripts that are supposed to interact with (HT|X)ML documents?

If your usage scenario is the former, I recommend using node.js. It is under heavy development, but it is already very usable. For my first project with Node I wrote an XMPP chat bot, completely in JavaScript.

Edit:

I seem to have overlooked "using jsc" in the question and answered "How to run JavaScript on OS X?" instead. Still, I think Node is a better alternative if the author is looking to use JavaScript in place of something like Python or Perl.