Tutorial

MaSH stands for “Making Stuff Happen”. It’s the scripting language built into Foldr. You use it to automate the jobs people do by hand: filing documents into folders, filling in custom fields, sending a message when a file arrives, tidying up on a schedule.

This tutorial teaches the language by building up small scripts. Read it in order. Each chapter uses only what the earlier ones introduced.

You don’t need to be a programmer. If you’ve written a spreadsheet formula or a simple macro, you know enough to start.

What you’ll need

• A Foldr account that can open Settings > MaSH. Ask your administrator if you can’t see it.
• About twenty minutes for each chapter.

The chapters from Your first script to When things go wrong need nothing but the editor. They print their results, so you can run every example on its own. The chapters from Files and folders to Talking to the outside world touch shares, events, mail and web services. Those examples are marked so you know they need a real share or an outside service, and you can read them without running them.

The chapters

1. Your first script: where you write MaSH, and how to run it.
2. Values and arithmetic: text, numbers and variables.
3. Decisions and loops: if, each, while.
4. Collections: arrays, dictionaries and mash.collect.
5. Blocks: reusable pieces of script.
6. When things go wrong: error blocks, fail and exit.
7. Files and folders: mash.files and File objects.
8. Custom fields: reading and writing a file’s fields.
9. Reacting to events: scripts that run when something happens.
10. Talking to the outside world: JSON, web requests and mail.
11. Putting it together: a small filing workflow.
12. Where next: the reference, and the real scripts to learn from.

How the examples look

A block of MaSH is followed by what it prints:

Natural

printline "This is an example"

This is an example

Standard

printline("This is an example")

This is an example

When you see a block with no output, it runs but prints nothing. The examples in this tutorial are checked automatically against the real language, so what you read here is what you’ll see.