Negative values in command line parameters.

Community Support
1

Hi All,

I want to start my q process with some negative numbers passed in command line.

e.g. q test.q -date 2012.02.02 -feedId -2

But it throws me error treating the “2” as an option.

Has someone encountered the same issue?

Regards.

2

Anything on the cmd line prefaced with a hyphen is considered an option. Here is some more info - http://code.kx.com/q4m3/13\_Commands\_and\_System\_Variables/#132-command-line-parameters

I guess one option could be to prefix ‘negative’ options with 0 - as either way you are going to have to parse the option to get a non string/meaningful option

By prefixing with 0 you can then ‘value’ the option and avoid a cast

q -q -feedId 0-2

value last .z.x

-2

q -q -feedId 2

value last .z.x

2

q -q -feedId 0+2

value last .z.x

2

I think that’s a bit easier than escaping and casting

q -q -feedId -2

last .z.x

“\-2”

“J”$1_last .z.x

-2

But I’d personally look to changing the feedIds to positive only or maybe incrementing the map or something like that

HTH,

Sean 

3

single char cmd line params are reserved for kdb+ itself

you can get around that with e.g.

-feedId "-2 "


but better to change your arg so it doesn’t conflict at all

4

Thanks a lot.. That did help..!

5

That answers my doubts. Thanks a lot.