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Command Line Flags

Because the usage of DotSlash is:

dotslash DOTSLASH_FILE [OPTIONS]

where [OPTIONS] is forwarded to the executable represented by DOTSLASH_FILE, DotSlash's own command line flags must be able to be disambiguated from DOTSLASH_FILE. In practice, that means any flag recognized by DotSlash is an unsupported DotSlash file name. For this reason, the set of supported flags is fairly limited.

Supported Flags​

flagdescription
--helpprints basic usage info, as well as the platform it was compiled for (which is the entry it will use from the "platforms" map in a DotSlash file)
--versionprints the DotSlash version number and exits

Experimental Commands​

Experimental commands are special flags that we are not committed to supporting, and whose output format should be considered unstable. These commands are "hidden" behind -- (using -- as the first argument to dotslash tells it to use a special argument parser) and are used like so:

$ dotslash -- cache-dir
/Users/mbolin/Library/Caches/dotslash
commanddescription
b3sum FILEprints the BLAKE3 hash of FILE
cache-dirprints the absolute path to the user's DotSlash cache and exits
create-url-entry URLgenerates the DotSlash JSON snippet for the artifact at the URL
fetch DOTSLASH_FILEfetches the artifact identified by DOTSLASH_FILE if it is not already in the cache
parse DOTSLASH_FILEparses DOTSLASH_FILE and prints the data as pure JSON to stdout
sha256 FILEprints the SHA-256 hash of FILE

Environment Variables​

The DOTSLASH_CACHE environment variable can be used to override the default location of the DotSlash cache. By default, the DotSlash cache resides at:

platformpath
Linux$XDG_CACHE_HOME/dotslash or $HOME/.cache/dotslash
macOS$HOME/Library/Caches/dotslash
Windows{FOLDERID_LocalAppData}/dotslash

DotSlash relies on dirs::cache_dir() to use the appropriate default directory on each platform.