LUA5.3(1)

✨ lua — bestie edition ✨

okay so you're looking at the man page for lua, the Lua interpreter — like, from the Lua 5.3 era, hanging out in the General Commands Manual section of your terminal. she's a whole legend, an icon, the moment. let's get into it 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

lua [ options ] [ script [ args ] ]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. options, maybe a script, maybe some args. slay.

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay bestie, here's the tea: lua is the standalone Lua interpreter. she loads and executes Lua programs — either as textual source form or as precompiled binary form. (those precompiled binaries? they get output by luac, the Lua compiler, in case you were wondering 🫶). and lua can do both jobs: be a batch interpreter and be interactive. she's versatile like that. main character energy fr fr.

so the way it works: the given options get handled in order, and then the Lua program in the file script is loaded and executed. the given args are available to script as strings in a global table named arg. no cap.

and listen — if you give her no options or arguments at all, then:

• if the standard input is a terminal → -v -i is assumed
• otherwise → - is assumed

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🦋 Interactive mode 🦋

when you're in interactive mode, lua prompts you, reads lines from the standard input, and executes them as they are read. literally as they come in. 🎀

• if the line contains an expression or a list of expressions → the line gets evaluated and the results are printed
• if a line does not contain a complete statement → a secondary prompt is displayed, and lines keep being read until a complete statement is formed or a syntax error is found 💀

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🧚 The very start (before anything else) 🧚

before she even touches the command line, lua checks the contents of these environment variables, in this exact order:

1. LUA_INIT_5_3
2. LUA_INIT

if the contents is of the form '@filename', then filename is executed. otherwise, the string is assumed to be a Lua statement and is executed. periodt. ✨

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

one bullet per flag, all facts intact, let's go:

• -e stat — execute the statement stat.
• -i — enter interactive mode after executing script.
• -l name — execute the equivalent of name=require('name') before executing script.
• -v — show version information.
• -E — ignore environment variables.
• -- — stop handling options.
• - — stop handling options and execute the standard input as a file.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• luac(1)
• The documentation at lua.org, especially section 7 of the reference manual.

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🙈 DIAGNOSTICS 🙈

Error messages should be self explanatory. (she said, confidently. and honestly? she's right. 😭)

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

R. Ierusalimschy, L. H. de Figueiredo, W. Celes — the three absolute founders of the whole situation. bows were taken. 🫶

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k that's the whole page bestie, go write something iconic with it. no bugs, only slay. 💖

and for the cute sign-off: this beauty is stamped $Date: 2016/10/17 15:43:50 $ and lives on the LUA5.3(1) page of the General Commands Manual. iconic era, iconic date, we love to see it. 🎀✨