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.

Chapters 1 to 6 need nothing but the editor. They print their results, so you can run every example on its own. Chapters 7 to 10 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.