I know this thread is quite aged, but anyway, the question is still up to date :-)
Just having started with Dashcode and widgets myself, I did a quick hack on this:
function doGetEnv(event)
{
if (window.widget)
{
var out = widget.system("/bin/bash -c set", null).outputString;
document.getElementById("content").innerText = out;
}
}
For my experimental widget, I did use a scroll area and a button. The doGetEnv(event) is fired upon onclick, set via inspector. The Id "content" is the standard naming of the content within the scroll area.
The out var containes a string with '\n' charaters, to transform it into an array use split().
function doGetEnv(event)
{
if (window.widget)
{
var out = widget.system("/bin/bash -c set", null).outputString;
out = out.split("\n");
document.getElementById("content").innerText = out[0];
}
}
The first entry is "BASH..." in my case.
If you search for a particular item, use STRING's match method (see also http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_match.asp) along with the following pages on regular expressions:
To cache the environment, you can use:
var envCache = "";
function cacheENV()
{
envCache = widget.system("/bin/bash -c set", null).outputString;
envCache = envCache.split("\n");
}
This will leave an array in envCache. Alternative:
function cacheENV()
{
var envCache = widget.system("/bin/bash -c set", null).outputString;
envCache = envCache.split("\n");
return envCache;
}