Keywords: pame

Subsections

- Exercises

# The command line

When you execute a program at the command prompt, you type the identification of the program and then press return. You can specify parameters (sometimes called arguments) for the program after the program identification. These can then be accessed by the program to modify its activities.

Hitherto, the identifications of books have always been written into the actual code. In the last exercise, the input book was called `inbook` and the output book `outbook`. If your program could be given the identifications of the books whenever you executed the program, then it could have a much wider applicability.

The command line is available to the program via the channel `arg channel`. Here is a small program which reads its first argument and prints it on the screen:

       PROGRAM arg1 CONTEXT VOID
       USE standard
       IF FILE args;  open(args,"",arg channel)/=0
       THEN
          put(stand error,
              ("Cannot access the command line",
               newline));
          stop
       ELSE
         on logical file end(arg,
            (REF FILE f)BOOL:
               (put(stand error,
                    ("No parameters",newline));
                FALSE));
         STRING id;
         get(arg,id);  write((id,newline))
       FI
       FINISH

Some points to note:

1. `stand error` is an output `FILE` which is usually used for error messages.
2. The identification field in the call to `open` is ignored by `arg channel`. In the example, it is written as the empty string.
3. `stop` is equivalent to `exit(0)`.
4. In Linux, the first parameter is always the full path of the identification of the program.

You can only read via the `arg channel` (using `get`). `make term` has already been set to make the string terminator `blank` (the last argument is always followed by a space) so you can read the individual parameters from the command line by reading strings. However, you should note that when you have read a string, the next character will be the terminator of the string. So when you have read a string, you will need to skip all characters which could possibly terminate the reading of a string (known as terminators) otherwise the next read of a string will yield the null string (denoted by `""`). The procedure `skip terminators` with header

       PROC skip terminators=(REF FILE f)VOID:

is used for this purpose.

## Exercises

9.8
  Modify exercise `ex9.5` (see 9.4) to get the identifiers of its input and output books from the command line (remember that the first argument is always the program id, so use a `LOC STRING` for it). Remember to cater for the end of the input file. Ans
9.9
  Write a program to replace all the spaces in its input book with the asterisk and write out the resulting lines to its output book, the book identifiers being given on the command line. Ans