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. You can use cl:parse-namestring to see the expansion of this path. 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 (all on one line):
C:\Program Files\LispWorks>lispworks-7-0-0-x86-win32.exe -init my-lisp-init
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:
C:\Program Files\LispWorks>lispworks-7-0-0-x86-win32.exe -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.
LispWorks Release Notes and Installation Guide - 2 Mar 2015