Invoking the program

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.

These are the options that can also be provided on the command line.

-- -- ignore previous arguments after reloading data

-e x -- evaluates the expression x

-h -- displays the usage message

-mpwprompt -- MPW-style imput prompts

-n -- print no input prompts

-q -- suppresses loading of init file 'init.m2'

-s -- stops execution if an error occurs

-silent -- don't print the startup banner

-tty -- assume stdin is a tty

-x -- special mode for running examples

The file M2 is actually a shell script which calls the executable file with appropriate arguments for loading the Macaulay 2 code previously compiled.

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