The simplest way to run a program is by the initialization/2 directive in combination with library(main). The library(main) provides a default entry point main/0 to run a program non-interactively. It also provides for parsing commandline options using argv_options/3.

See library(main) for details. After defining the Prolog source file according to the library(main), the program may be executed as

swipl [prolog option ...] myprog.pl [application option ...]

If you want to load the program rather than executing it you can use

swipl -l myprog.pl -- [application option ...]

After this, the program may be edited using edit/0 or edit/1, reloaded using make/0 and executed interactively by calling

?- main.

To trace the execution using the source level debugger, use

?- gtrace, main.

On POSIX systems, the script can be turned into an executable by starting the file with the "hash-bang" line below and making it executable using `chmod +x myprog`

#!/usr/bin/env swipl

Note that a script that starts with #! does not need to have the .pl extension to be recognized as a Prolog source file.

See also

- App.md for adding apps to SWI-Prolog