Shortcuts output *on the command line*

Tech Support
1

I’m losing my mind on this. I created a Shortcut to query the power state of a HomeKit light and based on that either turn it off or on. I.e. it does a toggle (because apparently toggling power state is not something anyone ever wants to do!)

Anyway, the final step in the Shortcut is to get the power state again, as I want to be able to run the Shortcut in a script and the script to know what the resulting state is.

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As you can see, it works fine to spit out “Yes” or “No” based on whether it’s now turned on or not. But, when I execute the Shortcut from the command line with shortcuts run "Toggle Canvas" I get nothing.

I have also tried the following variants based on this page and the shortcuts man page.

shortcuts run "Toggle Canvas" --output-type public.text
shortcuts run "Toggle Canvas" --output-path -
shortcuts run "Toggle Canvas" --output-path - --output-type public.text

None of them produce anything. The Shortcut toggles the light and I get no output. I also tried redirecting to a file and that file is just empty.

Does anyone know the secret incantation to get this to produce something?

2

Maybe a typo?
(And 20 more characters)

3

Run:

shortcuts run “Toggle Canvas” | cat

If you want the output in a text file:

shortcuts run “Toggle Canvas” > ~/path/filename.txt

4

Thank you!!!

I don’t quite understand why stdout has to be plumbed to stdin to see anything, but I will take a working solution.

5

Nothing to understand there, just a terrible implementation.

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