Emacs Lisp: Get Command Line Arguments

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

when you run emacs lisp script from terminal

emacs --script do.el arg1 arg2

[see Emacs Lisp: Run Emacs Lisp Code in Shell]

You can get the arguments in elisp from the variable argv

argv
A built-in variable. Its value is a list. Each element is a item from the command line.
(message "argv 0: %s" (elt argv 0)) ; %s is for string
(message "argv 1: %s" (elt argv 1))
(message "argv 2: %s" (elt argv 2))
(message "argv 3: %s" (elt argv 3))

Save and name the above script as test.el and run it like this:

emacs --script test.el uni 2 -tri

Here's the output:

$ emacs --script test.el uni 2 -tri
argv 0: "uni"
argv 1: "2"
argv 2: "-tri"
argv 3: nil

(info "(elisp) Command-Line Arguments")

Thanks to Piotr Chamera [piotr_cham…@poczta.onet.pl], Swami Tota Ram Shankar [tota_…@india.com].


Practical Elisp ⭐

Writing Command

Text Processing

Get User Input

File/Buffer

Writing Script