Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, Second Edition

Parrot Command-Line Options

Since Parrot is both an assembler and a bytecode interpreter, it has options to control both behaviors. Some options may have changed by the time you read this, especially options related to debugging and optimization. The document imcc/docs/running.pod should have the latest details. Or just run parrot —help.

General Usage

parrot [options] file [arguments]

The file is either an .imc (.pir) or .pasm source file or a Parrot bytecode file. Parrot creates an Array object to hold the command-line arguments and stores it in P5 on program start.

Assembler Options

-a, --pasm

Assume PASM input on stdin. When Parrot runs a source file with a .pasm extension, it parses the file as pure PASM code. This switch turns on PASM parsing (instead of the default PIR parsing) when a source file is read from stdin.

-c,--pbc

Assume PBC file on stdin. When Parrot runs a bytecode file with a .pbc extension, it immediately executes the file. This option tells Parrot to immediately execute a bytecode file piped in on stdin.

-d,--debug [hexbits]

Turn on debugging output. The -d switch takes an optional argument, which is a hex value of debug bits. (The individual bits are shown in Table 11-3.) When hexbits isn’t specified, the default debugging level is 0001. If hexbits is separated from the -d switch by whitespace, it has to start with a number.

Table 11-3. Debug bits

Description	Debug bit
DEBUG_PARROT	0001
DEBUG_LEXER	0002
DEBUG_PARSER	0004
DEBUG_IMC	0008
DEBUG_CFG	0010 ...