General Information

	Eli: Translator Construction Made Easy
	Global Index
	Frequently Asked Questions
	Typical Eli Usage Errors

Tutorials

	Quick Reference Card
	Guide For new Eli Users
	Release Notes of Eli
	Tutorial on Name Analysis
	Tutorial on Scope Graphs
	Tutorial on Type Analysis
	Typical Eli Usage Errors

Reference Manuals

	User Interface
	Eli products and parameters
	LIDO Reference Manual
	Typical Eli Usage Errors

Libraries

	Eli library routines
	Specification Module Library

Translation Tasks

	Lexical analysis specification
	Syntactic Analysis Manual
	Computation in Trees

Tools

	LIGA Control Language
	Debugging Information for LIDO
	Graphical ORder TOol

FunnelWeb User's Manual

	Pattern-based Text Generator
	Property Definition Language
	Operator Identification Language
	Tree Grammar Specification Language
	Command Line Processing
	COLA Options Reference Manual

Generating Unparsing Code

Monitoring a Processor's Execution

Administration

System Administration Guide

Command Line Processing

What is a command line interface?

When a processor is invoked it will be from an interactive or batch shell of some kind. A command line will be used to specify the name of the processor and any inputs that it needs. A few typical Unix command lines are:

cc -o fred.exe fred.c
vi fred.c
rlogin prep.ai.mit.edu -l rms

Note that a pipe command such as:

format doc.troff | lpr -Plaser

In these examples various options are given to some of the tools via the command line. For example, -o fred.exe specifies that the output file of the C compilation should be called fred.exe rather than the default a.out. A major part of the job of a command line interface is to provide mechanisms for specifying which options are legal and allowing the processor to find out which ones the user actually supplied.

Other information can be provided on the command line in the form of positional parameters. For example, fred.c in the first two examples and prep.ai.mit.edu in the last are positional parameters. A command line interface is also responsible for providing access to positional parameters.

Unix provides access to the components of the command line for C programs via the argc and argv parameters to the main function. The facility described in this manual uses those parameters to provide higher-level access.