NAME

cli - command line interface compiler for C++

SYNOPSIS

cli [options] file

DESCRIPTION

cli generates C++ implementation and documentation in various formats for a command line interface defined in the CLI language. For an input file in the form name.cli the following is generated. By default or if the --generate-cxx option is specified, the following C++ files are generated: name.hxx (header file), name.ixx (inline file, generated unless the --suppress-inline option is specified), and name.cxx (source file). If the --generate-html option is specified, then the name.html HTML documentation file is generated. If the --generate-man option is specified, then the name.1 man page file is generated. When --generate-html or --generate-man is specified, the --stdout option can be used to redirect the output to STDOUT instead of a file.

OPTIONS

--help
Print usage information and exit.
--version
Print version and exit.
--output-dir|-o dir
Write the generated files to dir instead of the current directory.
--generate-modifier
Generate option value modifiers in addition to accessors.
--generate-file-scanner
Generate the argv_file_scanner implementation. This scanner is capable of reading command line arguments from the argv array as well as files specified with command line options.
--suppress-inline
Generate all functions non-inline. By default simple functions are made inline. This option suppresses creation of the inline file.
--suppress-usage
Suppress the generation of the usage printing code.
--long-usage
If no short documentation string is provided, use the complete long documentation string in usage. By default, in this situation only the first sentence from the long string is used.
--option-length len
Indent option descriptions len characters when printing usage. This is useful when you have multiple options classes, potentially in separate files, and would like their usage to have the same indentation level.
--generate-cxx
Generate C++ code. If neither --generate-man nor --generate-html is specified, this mode is assumed by default.
--generate-man
Generate documentation in the man page format.
--generate-html
Generate documentation in the HTML format.
--man-prologue file
Insert the content of file at the beginning of the man page file.
--man-epilogue file
Insert the content of file at the end of the man page file.
--html-prologue file
Insert the content of file at the beginning of the HTML file.
--html-epilogue file
Insert the content of file at the end of the HTML file.
--class fq-name
Generate the man page or HTML documentation only for the fq-name options class. The fq-name name should be a fully-qualified options class name, for example, app::options. This functionality is useful if you need to insert custom documentation between options belonging to different classes.
--stdout
Write output to STDOUT instead of a file. This option is not valid when generating C++ code and is normally used to combine generated documentation for several option classes in a single file.
--hxx-suffix suffix
Use suffix instead of the default .hxx to construct the name of the generated header file.
--ixx-suffix suffix
Use suffix instead of the default .ixx to construct the name of the generated inline file.
--cxx-suffix suffix
Use suffix instead of the default .cxx to construct the name of the generated source file.
--man-suffix suffix
Use suffix instead of the default .1 to construct the name of the generated man page file.
--html-suffix suffix
Use suffix instead of the default .html to construct the name of the generated HTML file.
--option-prefix prefix
Use prefix instead of the default - as an option prefix. Unknown command line arguments that start with this prefix are treated as unknown options. If you set the option prefix to the empty value, then all the unknown command line arguments will be treated as program arguments.
--option-separator sep
Use sep instead of the default -- as an optional separator between options and arguments. All the command line arguments that are parsed after this separator are treated as program arguments. Set the option separator to the empty value if you don't want this functionality.
--include-with-brackets
Use angle brackets (<>) instead of quotes ("") in the generated #include directives.
--include-prefix prefix
Add prefix to the generated #include directive paths.
--guard-prefix prefix
Add prefix to the generated header inclusion guards. The prefix is transformed to upper case and characters that are illegal in a preprocessor macro name are replaced with underscores.
--reserved-name name=rep
Add name with an optional rep replacement to the list of names that should not be used as identifiers. If provided, the replacement name is used instead. All C++ keywords are already in this list.
--options-file file
Read additional options from file with each option appearing on a separate line optionally followed by space and an option value. Empty lines and lines starting with # are ignored. The semantics of providing options in a file is equivalent to providing the same set of options in the same order on the command line at the point where the --options-file option is specified except that shell escaping and quoting is not required. Repeat this option to specify more than one options files.

DIAGNOSTICS

If the input file is not a valid CLI definition, cli will issue diagnostic messages to STDERR and exit with non-zero exit code.

BUGS

Send bug reports to the cli-users@codesynthesis.com mailing list.