Site and personal initialisation

Upon initialisation, SWI-Prolog reads both site initialisation and personal initialisation files. Both can be controlled explicitely using commandline options ( -F base for site- and -f base for personal initialisation).

The site-initialisation file is located in the SWI-Prolog home directory. Its name is deduced from the commandname by taking the leading alphanumerical characters, followed by the extension .rc. Using default installation this implies pl.rc for the Unix version and plwin.rc for the Windows version.

Note that XPCE is bound to SWI-Prolog by adding this file.

The personal initialisation file is called .plrc on Unix and pl.ini on Windows. It is searched using the file_search_path/2 alias user_profile. This refers to the current working directory, the users home (if any) or the Prolog home if the user has none (single-user OS).

In PLWIN.EXE, the personal initialisation file is accessible through the Settings menu. First use copies a default file with some commented common constructs. The same behaviour is also available from the graphical Prolog manual provided by XPCE and started with help/0.

The -s file commandline option is commonly used on Unix systems to load and start applications using a single command.

-- JanWielemaker - 28 May 2002