Thread: Changing a program to accept command line arguments

I have the following piece of code, I want to modify it so that it can accept command line arguments w/o using a scanner to read the file. What changes do I need to make in my code? I have a file called prgm.cmd, prgm.cmd is the actual argument! and I'll execute it on UNIX as follows:

java Commander prgm.cmd

The only way to make my program work currently is as below:

java Commander < prgm.cmd

Here is the CODE:

import java.util.Scanner;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.StringTokenizer;
 
public class Commander
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        Map<String,Integer> expression = new HashMap<String,Integer>();
        ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
 
        Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
 
        while(true)
        {
            list.add(sc.nextLine());
            if(!sc.hasNextLine()) break;
        }
 
        ArrayList<String> tokens = new ArrayList<String>();
        ArrayList<String> PRINT = new ArrayList<String>();
 
 
        for(String element : list) {
            StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(element);
 
            if(!element.startsWith("PRINT")) {
                while(st.hasMoreTokens()) {
                    tokens.add(st.nextToken());
                }
 
                expression.put(tokens.get(0),Integer.parseInt(tokens.get(2)));
                tokens.clear();
            } else {
                while(st.hasMoreTokens())
                    PRINT.add(st.nextToken());
                System.out.println(expression.get(PRINT.get(1)));
                PRINT.clear();
            }
        }
    }
}

prgm.cmd command file

A = 6   
C = 14
PRINT C 
B = 12
C = 8
PRINT A

Output

14
 6

public static void main(String[] args)
//                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If you run your program like:

java progname arg1 arg2

The arguments will appear in a string array handed to main(). Just extract them from there and do what you need.

The following program shows this in action. It will echo back your arguments, one per line:

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++)
            System.out.println (args[i]);
    }
}

This is to get the commands as arguments to the program.

If, instead, you want to still have the commands in a file and just supply the file name to the program, you simply need to change your scanner to use a file based reader rather than System.in

The following program accepts a file name argument then echos it to the screen:

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.util.Scanner;
 
public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
        Scanner sc = new Scanner (new FileInputStream(args[0]));
        while (sc.hasNextLine())
            System.out.println (sc.nextLine());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            System.exit(1);
        }
    }
}

You can even make it selectable, like UNIX filter programs using - to indicate standard input.

I hope this answered your query!

Read https://www.scaler.com/topics/comman...ments-in-java/ an Informative resource on Command Line Arguments in Java.