Introduction to the CLI application

Introduction to the CLI application#

To begin, open the terminal application.

On Windows, right-click the Start icon or press Windows+X. Then, select Terminal.

On macOS, open Finder, then select Applications, Utilities, then Terminal.

On Linux, open Applications. Select System, then Terminal. Or, search for “terminal”.

The terminal application will then present a command line interface (CLI). On Windows, this is PowerShell. On macOS or Linux, this is typically Bash shell.

If you have the application is under the search path (PATH environment variable), to run it, type:

warcat

and press enter.

Or, enter the location of the executable directly. For example (Windows):

.\Downloads\warcat.exe

macOS/Linux:

./Downloads/warcat

and press enter.

If it is successful, the warcat application will display help information.

Entering

warcat help

will also show a list of commands and options. help is known as an argument that is passed to the program.

For example using the list command:

warcat list --input my_warc_file.warc.gz

The above command has 3 arguments to the program:

  1. list is the command.

  2. --input is an option. It starts with 2 hyphens. This specifies that the program should accept an input filename.

  3. my_warc_file.warc.gz is a value to the input option.

If an option value has spaces or special symbols, put quotation marks:

warcat list --input "My WARC File (Copy).warc.gz"

Option values can also be specified by a = character if it helps with clarity:

warcat list --input=my_warc_file.warc.gz
warcat list --input="My WARC File (Copy).warc.gz"

Note that some options don’t take a value. These options are also known as flags (as in boolean true/false):

warcat --quiet

If you need help in a command, enter something like:

warcat help list