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Invoking the program

On systems with a command line interface, the following commands can be used to start the program. When the program starts up, the initialization file, init.m2, will be loaded.

M2 -- starts the program.

M2 file1 file2 ... -- starts the program, reading and executing the specified files.

The options that can be provided on the command line may be displayed by running M2 --help, as follows.

i1 : run "M2 --help";
usage:
    M2 [option ...] [file ...]
options:
    --help             print this brief help message and exit
    --no-backtrace     print no backtrace after error
    --copyright        display full copyright messasge
    --no-debug         do not enter debugger upon error
    --dumpdata         read source code, dump data if so configured, exit (no init.m2)
    --fullbacktrace    print full backtrace after error
    --no-loaddata      don't try to load the dumpdata file
    --int              don't handle interrupts
    --notify           notify when loading files during initialization
                       and when evaluating command line arguments
    --no-prompts       print no input prompts
    --no-readline      don't use readline
    --no-setup         don't try to load setup.m2 or to loaddata
    --no-personality   don't set the personality and re-exec M2 (linux only)
    --prefix DIR       set prefixDirectory
    --print-width n    set printWidth=n (the default is the window width)
    --silent           no startup banner
    --stop             exit on error
    --texmacs          TeXmacs session mode
    --version          print version number and exit
    -q                 don't load user's init.m2 file or use packages in home directory
    -E '...'           evaluate expression '...' before initialization
    -e '...'           evaluate expression '...' after initialization
    -x                 example prompts, don't use readline
environment:
    M2ARCH             a hint to find the dumpdata file as
                       bin/../cache/Macaulay2-$M2ARCH-data, where bin is the
                       directory containing the Macaulay2 executable
    EDITOR             default text editor
    LOADDATA_IGNORE_CHECKSUMS      (for debugging)

To terminate the program, one may type exit, quit, end, or the end of file character.