2.4.2 Command line options for running Prolog
Note that boolean options may be written as --name
(true), --noname
or --no-name
(false). They
are written as --no-name
below as the default is‘true’.
- -D name[=value]
- Set the Prolog flag name to value. The flags are
set immediately after loading the initial saved state. If the
flag is already defined, value is converted to the type of
the flag. If the flag is undefined it is set to a number of value
represents a number and an atom otherwise. If no
value is given, a Boolean value is used. If name is=
no-
flag, flag is set tofalse
. Otherwise, the flag name is set totrue
. Thename[=value]
may follow the-D
immediately or appear as the next commandline argument.Note that many of the commandline options are reflected by a Prolog flag. We intend to handle these as synonyms. Currently, some of the commandline flags affect the Prolog initilization before loading the saved state has completed, while other may not be changed after Prolog initialization. For example, future versions will support
-Dhome=dir
to change the notion of the Prolog installation directory. - --debug-on-interrupt
- Enable debugging on an interrupt signal (Control-C,
SIGINT
) immediately. Normally debugging on interrupt is enabled when entering the interactive toplevel. This flag can be used to start the debugger on an interrupt while executing goals from -g or initialization/[1,2]. See also the Prolog flag debug_on_interrupt. - --home[=DIR]
- Use DIR as home directory. See section 12.6 for details. If DIR is omitted, the found location is printed and the process exits. If the location cannot be found an error is printed and the process exits with status 1.
- --quiet
- Set the Prolog flag verbose
to
silent
, suppressing informational and banner messages. Also available as -q. - --no-debug
- Disable debugging. See the current_prolog_flag/2 flag generate_debug_info for details.
- --no-signals
- Inhibit any signal handling by Prolog, a property that is sometimes
desirable for embedded applications. This option sets the flag
signals to
false
. See section 12.4.25.1 for details. Note that the handler to unblock system calls is still installed. This can be prevented using--sigalert=0
additionally. See --sigalert. - --no-threads
- Disable threading for the multi-threaded version at runtime. See also the flags threads and gc_thread.
- --no-packs
- Do not attach extension packages (add-ons). See also attach_packs/0 and the Prolog flag packs.
- --no-pce
- Enable/disable the xpce GUI subsystem. The default is to make it
available as autoload component if it is installed and the system can
access the graphics. Using
--pce
load the xpce system in user space and--no-pce
makes it unavailable in the session. - --on-error =style
- How to handle on errors. See the Prolog flag on_error for details.
- --on-warning =style
- How to handle on warnings. See the Prolog flag on_warning for details.
- --pldoc [=port]
- Start the PlDoc documentation system on a free network port and launch
the user's browser on
http://localhost:
port. If port is specified, the server is started at the given port and the browser is not launched. - --sigalert=NUM
- Use signal NUM (1 ... 31) for alerting a thread. This is
needed to make thread_signal/2,
and derived Prolog signal handling act immediately when the target
thread is blocked on an interruptible system call (e.g., sleep/1,
read/write to most devices). The default is to use
SIGUSR2
. If NUM is 0 (zero), this handler is not installed. See prolog_alert_signal/2 to query or modify this value at runtime. - --no-tty
- Unix only. Switches controlling the terminal for allowing single-character commands to the tracer and get_single_char/1. By default, manipulating the terminal is enabled unless the system detects it is not connected to a terminal or it is running as a GNU-Emacs inferior process. See also tty_control.
- --win-app
- This option is available only in swipl-win.exe and is used for
the start-menu item. If causes plwin to start in the folder
...\My Documents\Prolog
or local equivalent thereof (see win_folder/2). TheProlog
subdirectory is created if it does not exist. - -O
- Optimised compilation. See current_prolog_flag/2 flag optimise for details.
- -l file
- Load file. This flag provides compatibility with some other Prolog systems.10YAP, SICStus It is used in SWI-Prolog to skip the program initialization specified using initialization/2 directives. See also section 2.11.1.1, and initialize/0.
- -s file
- Use file as a script file. The script file is loaded after the initialisation file specified with the -f file option. Unlike -f file, using -s does not stop Prolog from loading the personal initialisation file.
- -f file
- Use file as initialisation file instead of the default
init.pl
.‘-f none’stops SWI-Prolog from searching for a startup file. This option can be used as an alternative to -s file that stops Prolog from loading the personal initialisation file. See also section 2.2. - -F script
- Select a startup script from the SWI-Prolog home directory. The script
file is named
<script>.rc
. The default script name is deduced from the executable, taking the leading alphanumerical characters (letters, digits and underscore) from the program name. -F none stops looking for a script. Intended for simple management of slightly different versions. One could, for example, write a scriptiso.rc
and then select ISO compatibility mode usingpl -F iso
or make a link from iso-pl to pl. - -x bootfile
- Boot from bootfile instead of the system's default boot file. A boot file is a file resulting from a Prolog compilation using the -b or -c option or a program saved using qsave_program/[1,2].
- -p alias=path1[:path2 ...
- Define a path alias for file_search_path. alias is the name
of the alias, and arg path1 ... is a list of values for the alias. On
Windows the list separator is
. On other systems it is;
. A value is either a term of the form alias(value) or pathname. The computed aliases are added to file_search_path/2 using asserta/1, so they precede predefined values for the alias. See file_search_path/2 for details on using this file location mechanism.:
- --traditional
- This flag disables the most important extensions of SWI-Prolog version 7 (see section 5) that introduce incompatibilities with earlier versions. In particular, lists are represented in the traditional way, double quoted text is represented by a list of character codes and the functional notation on dicts is not supported. Dicts as a syntactic entity, and the predicates that act on them, are still supported if this flag is present.
- --
- Stops scanning for more arguments, so you can pass arguments for your application after this one. See current_prolog_flag/2 using the flag argv for obtaining the command line arguments.