LUA(1)

💖 LUA(1) — like, the Lua interpreter bestie 💖

okay so welcome to lua(1), the main character of the Lua cinematic universe ✨ she's the stand-alone Lua interpreter and she's literally so good at her job.

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🦋 SYNOPSIS

lua [ options ] [ script [ args ] ]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION

lua is the stand-alone Lua interpreter, no cap. She loads and executes Lua programs — either as textual source code or in precompiled binary form. (The precompiled binaries are output by luac, the Lua compiler, iykyk.) And the way that she can be used as a batch interpreter and interactively? Versatile queen behavior, honestly. 👑

So here's the vibe: the options you give (they're listed down below, keep scrolling 💅) get executed first, and then the Lua program in the file script is loaded and executed. The args you give are available to script as strings in a global table named arg. If those arguments have spaces or other characters that are special to the shell, you gotta quote them — but heads up, the shell is gonna strip those quotes right off. 🙈 The arguments in arg start at 0, and index 0 holds the string 'script'. The index of the last argument lives in arg.n. And the arguments you typed on the command line before script — including the name of the interpreter itself — are available at negative indices in arg. Cute, right?

At the very start, before even handling the command line, lua executes the contents of the environment variable LUA_INIT, if it's defined. If the value of LUA_INIT is of the form '@filename', then filename gets executed. Otherwise, the string is assumed to be a Lua statement and gets executed. Either way she's running it fr fr.

Options start with '-' and are described below. You can use '--' to signal the end of options. 🎀

If no arguments are given, then -v -i is assumed when the standard input is a terminal; otherwise, - is assumed.

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🧚 Interactive mode (the group chat experience)

In interactive mode, lua prompts you, reads lines from the standard input, and executes them as they're read. If a line doesn't contain a complete statement, a secondary prompt shows up and lines keep getting read until a complete statement is formed or a syntax error is found.

So one way to interrupt the reading of an incomplete statement is to force a syntax error: adding a ';' in the middle of a statement is a sure way of forcing a syntax error (except inside multiline strings and comments — those must be closed explicitly, no shortcuts bestie).

If a line starts with '=', then lua displays the values of all the expressions in the remainder of the line. Those expressions must be separated by commas. ⭐

The primary prompt is the value of the global variable _PROMPT, if that value is a string; otherwise, the default prompt is used. Similarly, the secondary prompt is the value of the global variable _PROMPT2. So to change the prompts, set the corresponding variable to a string of your choice. You can do that after calling the interpreter or right on the command line — but in that case you have to be careful with quotes if the prompt string contains a space, otherwise you may confuse the shell. 😭 The default prompts are "> " and ">> ".

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• - — load and execute the standard input as a file, that is, not interactively, even when the standard input is a terminal. She said no chatting today. 💀
• -e stat — execute statement stat. You need to quote stat if it contains spaces, quotes, or other characters special to the shell.
• -i — enter interactive mode after script is executed. Bestie wants to keep talking. 🫶
• -l name — call require('name') before executing script. Typically used to load libraries. Very "let me just grab my things first" energy.
• -v — show version information. Slay, she's telling you who she is. 👑

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🌈 SEE ALSO

• luac(1)
• http://www.lua.org/

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💜 DIAGNOSTICS

Error messages should be self explanatory. She's not gonna make you guess. 🙅‍♀️

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🌟 AUTHORS

R. Ierusalimschy, L. H. de Figueiredo, and W. Celes — the icons who made all of this happen. 🎀

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And that's the whole page bestie!! 💖 This version is dated $Date: 2006/01/06 16:03:34 $ — yeah, she's an OG, been iconic since way back, and she still eats every single time. periodt. ✨🦋