Clozure CL Documentation

2.5. Command Line Options

When using Clozure CL from the command line, the following options may be used to modify its behavior. The exact set of Clozure CL command-line arguments may vary per platform and slowly changes over time. The current set of command line options may be retrieved by using the --help option.

-h (or --help). Provides a definitive (if somewhat terse) summary of the command line options accepted by the Clozure CL implementation and then exits.
-V (or --version). Prints the version of Clozure CL then exits. The version string is the same value that is returned by LISP-IMPLEMENTATION-VERSION.
-K character-encoding-name (or --terminal-encoding character-encoding-name). Specifies the character encoding to use for *TERMINAL-IO* (see Section 4.5.4, “Character Encodings”). Specifically, the character-encoding-name string is uppercased and interned in the KEYWORD package. If an encoding named by that keyword exists, CCL:*TERMINAL-CHARACTER-ENCODING-NAME* is set to the name of that encoding. CCL:*TERMINAL-CHARACTER-ENCODING-NAME* defaults to NIL, which is a synonym for :ISO-8859-1.

For example:
```
shell> ccl -K utf-8
	      
```
has the effect of making the standard CL streams use :UTF-8 as their character encoding.
-n (or --no-init). If this option is given, the init file is not loaded. This is useful if Clozure CL is being invoked by a shell script that should not be affected by whatever customizations a user might have in place.
-e form (or --eval). An expression is read (via READ-FROM-STRING) from the string form and evaluated. If form contains shell metacharacters, it may be necessary to escape or quote them to prevent the shell from interpreting them.
-l path (or --load path). Loads file specified by path.
-T n (or --set-lisp-heap-gc-threshold n). Sets the Lisp gc threshold to n. (see Section 16.3, “GC Page reclamation policy”
-Q (or --quiet). Suppresses printing of heralds and prompts when the --batch command line option is specified.
-R n (or --heap-reserve). Reserves n bytes for heap expansion. The default is 549755813888. (see Section 16.1, “Heap space allocation”)
-S n (or --stack-size n). Sets the size of the initial control stack to n. (see Section 7.3.1, “Thread Stack Sizes”)
-Z n (or --thread-stack-size n). Sets the size of the first thread's stack to n. (see Section 7.3.1, “Thread Stack Sizes”)
-b (or --batch). Execute in "batch mode". End-of-file from *STANDARD-INPUT* causes Clozure CL to exit, as do attempts to enter a break loop.
--no-sigtrap An obscure option for running under GDB.
-I image-name (or --image-name image-name). Specifies the image name for the kernel to load. Defaults to the kernel name with ".image" appended.

The --load and --eval options can each be provided multiple times. They're executed in the order specified on the command line, after the init file (if there is one) is loaded and before the toplevel read-eval-print loop is entered.

Finally, any arguments following the pseudo-argument -- are not processed, and are made available to Lisp as the value of ccl:*unprocessed-command-line-arguments*.