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 file may contain any valid Lisp code.
You can load a different initialization file using the option -init in the command line, for example:
unix% lispworks -init my-lisp-init
would make LispWorks load my-lisp-init.lisp as the initialization file instead of that named by *init-file-name*.
Alternatively, an initialization file may be specified by setting the UNIX environment variable LW_INIT. If set, the specified file will be used instead of that named by *init-file-name*.
The loading of the siteinit file (located by default at config/siteinit.lisp) may similarly be controlled either by the -siteinit command line argument, or the LW_SITE_INIT variable and *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:
unix% lispworks -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 initialization if you are intending to resave it.
In all cases, if the filename is non-nil, 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.
LispWorks Release Notes and Installation Guide - 2 Mar 2015