[TxMt] Using a command and waiting for stdout

[logista]

Hello everybody,

First, the caveats and the waffling: I'm new to TextMate, I'm not a
programmer, I hope I'm not missing something obvious, I've never posted to a
mailing list before.

There, now that's out of the way, here's my problem:

I process a lot of texts for Project Gutenberg. PG has a homemade C program
(GutCheck -- http://gutcheck.sourceforge.net) which checks for various
features in the text to make sure it's in good shape for posting to PG. I
normally run it from Terminal and thought I could easily make a Command to
do it from TextMate.

I made my command, and as long as I don't add any arguments, I get back the
"usage" information for GutCheck. So far, so good.

However, when I put in my file name (e.g. gutcheck "$TM_FILEPATH"), I don't
get anything other than a new empty untitled document and short-lived
beach-ball. If I make the command pipe into another (specific) document (e.g.
gutcheck "$TM_FILEPATH" > mynewfile.out), I get one line of response from
gutcheck, and then the rest of the information is stored in the other
document. I then have to open it separately; so it's not much different from
running the command in Terminal which is what I'm trying to avoid.

I thought it had something to do with GutCheck reporting to stderr instead
of stdout, but there's a switch available to turn that off. It didn't make
any difference.

The _weird_ thing though, is that when I have in my command "Output: Show as
HTML" (instead of Create New Document), everything is there in the HTML
window (but unreadable because there are no line breaks).

What am I missing or doing incorrectly?

Ah, another clue, perhaps: when I run the command on a short file (like this
message), it works as I expect (Command: gutcheck "$TM_FILEPATH" Output:
Create New Document). But few ebooks are 17 lines long. How do I make it
work for real texts (600 to 6000 or more lines)?

Thanks in advance for any advice,
Barbara
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