Command Line Processing

All of the non-interactive programs in the DocOrigin program suite (i.e. other than Design, FilterEditor and ConfigEditor) use a common command-line syntax and set of defaults. See Invoking Command Line Apps

Programs that run from a command line have the following basic syntax:

ProgramName –option1 value1 –option2 value2 …

Option names are documented in the Common Command Line Options as well as the Command Line Options of individual programs - see Command Options - Merge for instance. Generally, the option names can be mixed upper and lower case and are case insensitive. The following two are equivalent:

Merge -PDFCombineDocuments Yes ...
Merge -pdfcombinedocuments yes ...

All Option names and values are separated by one or more blanks. The values must be surrounded by double-quotes if they contain embedded blanks. The syntax Option=value can also be used. In that case, it is likely best to surround that whole pair with quotes.

When a quoted string starts with a dash, an equals sign must be used so that DocOrigin does not interpret the value as a new option. For example:

-mergeargs="-cache mail:no -profile $$F/my_lang.ini -documentTag 1"

If the same -option name occurs multiple times on the command line only the last setting takes effect. This allows you to override default settings made in the Default PRM files (see Indirect Parameter Files). Note also that the -parm, -cache, and -filter, (and as of 3.1.001.26 -attachment) option settings of Merge are exceptions — multiple occurrences of those options are all retained. Other exceptions will be noted in the documentation.