When LispWorks starts up, it looks for an initialization file to load. The name of the file is held in
*init-file-name*
, and is
~/.lispworks
by default. The '
~
' denotes your home directory, indicated as
Home
in the Finder. The initialization file may contain any valid Lisp code.
You can load a different initialization file using the option
-init
in the command line, for example:
% "/Applications/LispWorks 5.1/LispWorks.app/Contents/MacOS/lispworks-5-1-0-macos-universal" -init my-lisp-init
(where
%
denotes the Unix shell prompt) would make LispWorks load
my-lisp-init.lisp
as the initialization file instead of that named by
*init-file-name*
.
The loading of the siteinit file (located by default at
config/siteinit.lisp
) is similarly controlled by the
-siteinit
command line argument or
*site-init-file-name*
.
You can start an image without loading any personal or site initialization file by passing a hyphen to the
-init
and
-siteinit
arguments instead of a filename:
% "/Applications/LispWorks 5.1/LispWorks.app/Contents/MacOS/lispworks-5-1-0-macos-universal" -init - -siteinit -
This starts the LispWorks image without loading any initialization file. It is often useful to start the image in this way when trying to repeat a suspected bug. You should always start the image without the default initialization files if you are intending to resave it.
In all cases, if the filename is present, and is not a hyphen, LispWorks tries to load it as a normal file by calling
load
. If the load fails, LispWorks prints an error report.