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New commands

• (MEL only.) The python command allows you to call the Python interpreter from MEL. For more information, see Python in Maya.
• The nodeCast command allows you to swap/cast nodes of similar type within a graph or DAG path. It swaps all connections and parenting information and optionally allows values to be swapped. This is useful for situations where a pre-existing DAG hierarchy or dependency graph relationship exists and the user would like to replace a node with a similar node.
• The polyColorDel command deletes a color from a color set.
• The nParticle command edits one or more nParticle objects.
• The cacheFileTrack command is used for inserting and removing tracks related to the caches displayed in the Trax editor, and for modifying the track state.

Localization commands

There are new localization-related Maya commands and procedures available in the new System > Localization section of the Maya commands documentation. For example:

• The format command takes a string that contains parameter specifiers, which allows for alternate ordering of the passed-in values (for example, for other languages) by changing the format string.
• The uiRes MEL procedure looks up a given resource ID in the MEL resource catalog.

As well, string-processing commands such as size, substring, and tokenize, among others, now return or take character-based index values (instead of byte-based) for multibyte strings.

Changed commands

• The mi flag for the shelfButton command allows you to create pop-up menus on shelf buttons as well as copy pop-up menus from shelf buttons that are drag and dropped from shelf to shelf. Pop-up menus are useful for associating several distinct functions to an existing shelf button.
• The modelEditor command has new flags to turn on or off the display of selection highlighting, manipulators, and heads-up display.
• The getAttr command now properly returns the values if the attribute you are querying is a component list attribute.
• The filter flag for the commandEcho command allows you to set a filter for Echo All Commands mode. The filter is a list of strings. If any command starts with one of the list entries, that command does not output to the Script editor history.
• The references flag for the ls command lists references associated with files.
• The cacheFile command has several new flags: doubleToFloat, inTangent, outTangent, channelIndex, and dataSize, which help reduce file size, specify the in-tangent and out-tangent type when interpolating frames, and query file size or channel index.
• The about command has several new flags for working with localized versions of Maya, including uiLanguage, uiLanguageIsLocalized, and codeSet.

Python modules

The new Python modules (maya.cmds, maya.mel, and maya.eval) and their commands are discussed in detail in Python in Maya, Python and threading, and Important differences between MEL and Python.