Sorry for the late response...yea this worked great!

Thanks for the help. I am on Linux and will try this out and let you know how I get on!

I have a patch in which audio files are loaded into tables. This could potentially lead to a memory shortage thus leading to a crash. Is there a simple way in Pure Data to query the memory usage?

Thanks for any help on this.

Andy

Using regex (probably very inefficiently!) to get the dimension values:

#first script. shell from pd has no substring manipulation functionality!
string=`xdpyinfo | grep dimensions` #dimensions:     1028x325     (352x325 #mm)
firstNumberInd=`/usr/bin/expr match "$string" '\s*[a-z]*:\s*[0-9]'`
stripStart=${string:$firstNumberInd-1} #1023x325   (252x325 mm)
spaceInd=`expr index "$stripStart" \ ` 
numbers=${stripStart:0:$spaceInd-1} #1023x325
xInd=`expr index "$numbers" x `
width=${numbers:0:$xInd-1} #1023
height=${numbers:$xInd} #325
echo "w $width;"
echo "h $height;"

I am using the first characters in the echo as identifiers for either height or width.
This is great but my only problem now is that I still have to execute this script manually. I thought this would be easy to solve by using the shell object but it doesn't seem to like lines like this: stripStart=${string:$firstNumberInd-1} in which I'm using sub-strings.

@alexandros Thanks for the christmas present! I really wanted to avoid using scripts but I can see that this is a good solution for the moment so a huge thanks. I'll probably use regexp in the bash script to get the dimensions. Will post up the modified script once I get it working.
Thanks again!

I want to obtain a normalised range of 0-1 for the outputs of the MouseState object. I preferably want this to work on different systems that may have different screen dimensions so simple dividing the output of MouseState by a hardcoded height/width isn't what I'm after.
I used to use the toxy/tot external to find the screen dimensions but now that this external has been disabled I wonder how it's now possible to do this.
Also! One last point: I am after the screen dimensions and not the pure data window dimensions.

Thanks for your help!

I had a problem with converting a list of separated floats to a single float (4 9 2 to 492). Another issue I had was that the list/digit size was variable. The solution I used was : l2s (symbol 0 in right inlet) >> s2l >> unpack [f].