[Newbies] Passing arguments to squeak image

[David T. Lewis]

On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 01:53:44AM -0700, Patrick Collison wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Using latest SVN Squeak, I'm having trouble passing arguments to an image.
> 
> As far as I can see from the usage, it looks like "squeak foo.image
> bar" should pass bar as an argument to the image. Instead, though, I
> get a load error (the problem seems to be that Squeak is trying to
> load the url "file:bar" using the CodeLoader).
> 
> Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

Patrick,

By convention, the first argument after the image name and any VM
arguments is used to name a script file that is evaluated when the
image starts. For most Squeak images, you give the name of the
script file in the form of a fully qualified url such as
'file:///home/myaccount/mysqueakdir/myscript.st'. The script
file can contain Smalltalk expressions in "bang format", the
same format used for file-in and file-out. Thus you could have
a script file called "myscript.st" containing a Smalltalk
expression like this:
  "Smalltalk inspect ! "

There is a preference setting that you can use to control this:
  help... -> preferences... -> general -> readDocumentAtStartup

I am guessing that you are using a Unix VM; if so, there is a man
page ("man squeak") that gives some explanation. Also, "squeak -h"
will give some help, and there is a note at the bottom of the
help output that says "The first <argument> normally names a
Squeak `script' to execute."

Dave