CODEWITHSUNDEEP
julia
Philip Swannell
Philip Swannell

Reputation: 935

Julia on Windows. How to pass command line options to an executable file

I wish to call an executable file from Julia via Base.run (documented here) and pass command line options to that executable, but I can't figure out how to do that. In my specific example the executable is Notepad++ and the command line options are

-alwaysOnTop -nosession

This example code works, but doesn't pass the command line options:

function open_file_in_notepadpp()
    exepath =   "C:/Program Files (x86)/notepad++/notepad++.exe"   #Default location on 64 bit Windows
    command_line_options = "-alwaysOnTop -nosession "
    filetoopen = "c:/temp/foo.txt"
    Base.run(`$exepath $filetoopen`, wait = false)   
end

I've tried incorporating command_line_options a fair number of ways using backticks, double quotes etc. to no avail, so for example neither of the lines below work:

Base.run(`$exepath $filetoopen`, `$command_line_options`,wait = false)
Base.run(`$exepath $command_line_options $filetoopen`,wait = false)

In the Windows Command Prompt the following works correctly:

"C:/Program Files (x86)/notepad++/notepad++.exe" -alwaysOnTop -nosession "c:/temp/foo.txt"

Could someone explain what I'm missing?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 336

Answers (2)

Philip Swannell
Philip Swannell

Reputation: 935

crstnbr's answer was correct, but he was unable to test on his machine. Here is the corrected code:

function open_file_in_notepadpp()
    exepath =   "C:/Program Files (x86)/notepad++/notepad++.exe"   #Location if one follows the defaults in the notepad++ installer on 64 bit Wndows
    command_line_options = ["-alwaysOnTop", "-nosession"]          #Use an array to prevent the options being quoted 
    filetoopen = "c:/temp/foo.txt"

    Base.run(`$exepath $filetoopen $command_line_options`,wait = false)

end

Upvotes: 0

carstenbauer
carstenbauer

Reputation: 10147

If you substitute a string that contains spaces to a command it will get quoted. Hence, your command line arguments will be quoted and you get

julia> `$exepath $filetoopen $command_line_options`
`'C:/Program Files (x86)/notepad++/notepad++.exe' c:/temp/foo.txt '-alwaysOnTop -nosession '`

I guess what you really need is

julia> command_line_options = ["-alwaysOnTop", "-nosession"]
2-element Array{String,1}:
 "-alwaysOnTop"
 "-nosession"

julia> `$exepath $filetoopen $command_line_options`
`'C:/Program Files (x86)/notepad++/notepad++.exe' c:/temp/foo.txt -alwaysOnTop -nosession`

Running the latter with run should work. Unfortunately I can't test it on my machine.

Upvotes: 2

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