Using Command Line Completion (old syntax mechanism)

Note: this page describes the old syntax mechanism which is currently being phased out. Please refer to the parent menu for the pages on the new syntax mechanism.

The JNode Command Line Completion is one of the central aspects of the shell. JNode makes use of a sophisticated object model to declare command line arguments. This also provides for a standard way to extract a help-document that can be viewed by the user in different ways. Additionally, the very same object model can be used to access the arguments in a convenient manner, instead of doing the 133735th command line parsing implementation in computer history.

The following terms play an important role in this architecture:

• Parameter
  A key that can be passed to a programm. Typically, this are command line switches like "-h" or "--help", or indicators for the type of the assigned argument.
• Argument
  A value that can be passed to a program. This can be filenames, free texts, integers or whatever type of arguments the program needs.
• Syntax
  A program can define multiple Syntaxes, which provide for structurally different tasks it can handle. A Syntax is defined as a collection of mandatory and optional Parameters.