A brief note on using Inform 7 at the command line.

§1. Disclaimer. This is not documentation on the Inform language or its user-interface apps: it's a technical note on how the command-line tool inside those apps is called.

The inform7 executable has a few ancillary functions, but basically it takes natural language source text and compiles it to either "Inter", an intermediate-level code, or all the way to Inform 6 source code. In order to run, it needs access to numerous resources, and many of its command-line switches exist to specify where those are to be found.

If you are using Inform 7 at the command line, things are usually set up so that Inform 7 is installed in the directory inform7 with respect to your current working directory. inform7 is a composite of various files, and the executable inside is at inform7/Tangled/inform7. To test that it has been built successfully, try: 

    $ inform7/Tangled/inform7 -help

§2. When it runs, Inform 7 needs to know where it is installed in the file system. There is no completely foolproof, cross-platform way to know this (on some Unixes, a program cannot determine its own location), so Inbuild decides by the following set of rules:

§3. How the UI apps call Inform 7. The full range of options is complex, so it seems helpful to start by showing what the Inform UI apps typically call when the user clicks "Go": 

    $ inform7/Tangled/inform7 -internal I -external E -project P -format=F

for suitable pathnames I, E, P and a choice of F.

The format F can have quite a complex syntax. It takes the form of a sequence of criteria divided by slashes. The first will be the name of the language which inform7 is writing as its output; the second will be the architecture used. Thus, inform6/32d means "32-bit Inform 6 code with debugging enabled", and this in practice is what the Inform UI apps make when Glulx is the preferred virtual machine, as it is by default. But other alternatives are available at the command line, and it's also possible for -format to specify a semantic version number for the target, or some compilation options. See arch for a fuller description.

In previous releases of Inform, -format=F had a cruder syntax in which only -format=ulx, -format=z5 and -format=z8 were allowed. Those are still recognised, but deprecated. Inform will print a warning about this and supply the equivalent modern notation if one is used.

The project P is the directory holding the project to compile, such as Bronze.inform. On MacOS, this will be a bundle, and will look like an opaque binary file in the Finder, but it is a directory nevertheless.

The directories I and E tell Inform where to find its resources. Internal means "inside the app" — in other words, fixed material supplied with Inform and always present; external means "outside the app", and is where the user installs her own choice of extra resources.

§4. If no -external E is given, Inform behaves as it would in a clean installation with no external resources available.

If no -internal I is given on the command line, Inform 7 tries to find out where it is installed in the file system. There is no completely foolproof, cross-platform way to know this (on some Unixes, a program cannot determine its own location), so Inform decides by the following set of rules:

The default value for -internal is then the subdirectory Internal of this location: for example, inform7/Internal.

It is possible to specify additional sources of extensions and other resources with -nest N for some directory N: for a fuller explanation, see the Inbuild documentation.

§5. If the user of an Inform UI app clicks Release instead of Go, the command-line switch -release is added to the above command. See the main Inform documentation for what this does.

On some UI apps, there's a menu item "Release for testing...": this should add -debug to -release, which causes Inform to include debugging commands in the story file it generates. (Those commands are ordinarily suppressed by -release to prevent story files accidentally being shipped with them still in place.)

Similarly, the Settings pane in the app contains a checkbox for "Make random outcomes predictable when testing": the app achieves this by adding the switch -rng to the above command-line call.

§6. The Inter code generated by Inform 7 makes use of "kits" of pre-compiled Inter code, which have to be merged in. This process is carried out by a copy of the Inter tool inside inform7, and the choice of which kits are needed is managed by Inbuild. The inform7 command line allows this process to be customised. In particular, -basic will cause Inform to compile a "basic" project with no command parser or world model, and in general no interactive fiction-related infrastructure: it converts Inform into a general-purpose programming language. For examples of Basic Inform programs, see the test cases in inform7/Tests/Test Basic.

Non-standard kits for an Inform 7 project can be specified using a metadata file: see the inbuild documentation for more.

The three commands -pipeline, -pipeline-file and -variable control the way Inter performs code-generation on the output from inform7. Again, these needn't be used in normal circumstances, because the defaults are fine. They have the same meaning as for the inter tool, so see its documentation for more.

§7. The switch -source F tells Inform to read source text from the file F rather than from its normal location inside the project bundle. Note that if this switch is used from within the GUI app, by means of a settings file (see below), then on some platforms there may be permissions errors if F does not lie inside the bundle or Materials folder — in particular, sandboxing for the Mac App Store editions of the executables has this effect.

§8. If the app has a feature for systematically testing each example in an extension project, then it should add the switch -case A when running example A through inform7, -case B for B, and so on. This ensures that if the compiler generates Problem messages (i,e., if those tests fail to compile) then source-reference links will be to the right examples.

For ordinary, non-Extension, projects, this switch should not be used.

§9. Using Inform 7 without projects. To users of Inform UI apps, projects seem essential. On Mac OS, they are sealed boxes, looking like files in the Finder, but on all platforms they are in reality directories, containing not only the source code but also a variety of other things.

But it is also perfectly possible to use Inform 7 on isolated, single files of source code, rather as a C compiler might work on a single source file for a simple program. At its simplest, for example: 

    $ ls
    helloworld.i7
    $ cat helloworld.i7
    To begin:
        say "Hello world."
    $ inform7/Tangled/inform7 -basic helloworld.i7
    Inform 7 v10.1.0 has started.
    I've now read your source text, which is 5 words long.
    I've also read Basic Inform by Graham Nelson, which is 7687 words long.
    I've also read English Language by Graham Nelson, which is 2328 words long.

      The 5-word source text has successfully been translated. There were 0 rooms
      and 0 things.
    Inform 7 has finished.
    $ ls
    helloworld.i6       helloworld.i7

(This was a Basic Inform program, hence -basic.) That produced quite a bit of console chatter: the traditional Unix doctrine is that command-line tools should shut up when they operate without errors — "silence is golden", as the usual slogan has it. Use -silence to impose this on Inform: 

    $ ls
    helloworld.i7
    $ cat helloworld.i7
    To begin:
        say "Hello world."
    $ inform7/Tangled/inform7 -basic -silence helloworld.i7
    $ ls
    helloworld.i6       helloworld.i7

In -silence mode, any problem messages will also be rendered in a conventional Unix style, opening with filename:line: for the convenience of text editors or IDEs which throw back to source lines where errors occur.

As can be seen, helloworld.i7 was translated to helloworld.i6, and no other files were written: no Index, no Problems report page. This is because the options -no-index and -no-problems were automatically engaged. -log nothing was also implied, and no debugging log was produced. (All of these could be reactivated by command line settings, however.)

The output file can be specified with the traditional Unix compiler switch -o for "output": 

    $ inform7/Tangled/inform7 -basic -silence helloworld.i7 -o my-fancy-file.txt
    $ ls
    helloworld.i7       my-fancy-file.txt

The default output filename is the source filename but with the file extension changed from i7 to whatever is standard for the format being output. For example, 

    $ inform7/Tangled/inform7 -basic -silence helloworld.i7 -format=C
    $ ls
    helloworld.c        helloworld.i7

§10. Testing and debugging switches. The following switches are used only when testing or maintaining Inform, and are unlikely to be useful to end users. Many of these are, however, used in the Intest scripts for testing Inform 7 and Inblorb.

§11. Expert settings file. Ordinarily, when the user clicks (say) "Go", the GUI app calls the inform7 executable with various command-line settings to perform the actual work. The user has had no way to change those settings, except indirectly by e.g. clicking the checkbox to do with random number generation on the Settings pane. But that's the exception.

A new feature of inform7 in 2020 is that it looks in the Materials folder for an optional file called inform7-settings.txt. This is a sort of expert settings file, and consists of a list of additional command-line arguments (one per line): those are read exactly as if they had been passed on the command line.

§12. Prehistory. Build 1A01 was the first rough draft of a completed compiler: but it did not synchronise fully with the OS X Inform application until 1G22 and private beta-testing did not begin until 1J34. Other milestones include time (1B92), tables (1C86), component parts (1E60), indexing (1F46), systematic memory allocation (1J53), pattern matching (1M11), the map index (1P97), extension documentation support (1S39) and activities (1T89). The first round of testing, a heroic effort by Emily Short and Sonja Kesserich, came informally to an end at around the 1V50 build, after which a general rewriting exercise began. Minor changes needed for David Kinder's Windows port began to be made with 1W80, but the main aims were to increase speed and to improve clarity of source code. Hashing algorithms adapted to word-based syntax were introduced in 1Z50; the prototype parser was then comprehensively rewritten using a unified system to handle ambiguities and avoid blind alleys. A time trial of 2D52 against 1V59 on the same, very large, source text showed a speed increase of a factor of four. A second stage of rewriting, to generalise binary predicates and improve grammatical accuracy, began with 2D70. By the time of the first public beta release, 3K27, the testing tool inform-test had been written (it subsequently evolved into today's intest), and Emily Short's extensive suite of Examples had been worked into the verification process for builds. The history since 3K27 is recorded in the published change log.