6.2 Command-Line Arguments

When a Poke script is executed, the command line arguments passed to the script become available in the array argv. Example:

#!/usr/bin/poke -L
!#

for (arg in argv)
  print "Argument: " + arg + "\n";

Executing this script results in:

$ ./printargs foo bar 'baz quux'
Argument: foo
Argument: bar
Argument: baz quux

Note how it is not needed to have an argc variable, since the number of elements stored in a Poke array can be queried using an attribute: argv'length.

Note also that argv is only defined when poke runs as an interpreter:

$ poke
[...]
(poke) argv
<stdin>:1:1: error: undefined variable 'argv'
argv;
^~~~

Accessing the argv is more than enough for many simple programs. However, we may need a more sophisticated handling of command-line options: support for both short and long style options, adherence to the GNU coding standards, and the like. For these cases poke provides a pickle argp. See argp.