WML - Website META Language

2.0.8 (30-Oct-2001)

wml [-I PATH] [-i PATH] [-D NAME=STR] [-D NAME~PATH] [-n] [-r] [-O level] [-o [SLICETERMCW:]PATH[@CHMODOPT]] [-P PATH] [-E PATH] [-t] [-p STR] [-W STR] [-s] [-v [NUM]] [-q] [inputfile]

wml [-V [NUM]] [-h]

This is the control program of the Website META Language (WML), a free HTML generation toolkit for Unix, internally consisting of 9 independent languages.

The main idea of WML is a sequential filtering scheme where each language provides one of 9 processing passes. So wml reads inputfile (or from stdin if inputfile is a dash or completely missing), applies passes 1-9 (or only the passes specified by -p) and finally produces one or more outputfiles.

For more details on this processing scheme read the WML Introduction under wml_intro(7) and the WML Tutorial under wml_tutorial(7).

-I, --include=PATH

Adds a directory to the list of user include paths. Use this option to set the runtime environment for pass 1. See wml_p1_ipp(3) for more details.

-i, --includefile=PATH

Pre-loads a particular include file, i.e. virtually adds a

  #include "PATH"

at the top of inputfile. Use this to automatically include default user include files. If you want to include a systems include file you have to surround the PATH with angle brackets, for instance use ``CW-i CW"<foo/bar.wml>"'' to include the file foo/bar.wml from the system include area. Alternatively you can use the special syntax ``CWwml::foo::bar'' as with the CW#use directive.

-D, --define=NAME=STR

Defines a variable which can be interpolated in pass 1 (IPP) via CW$(NAME), in pass 2 (mp4h) via <CWget-var NAME>, in pass 3 (ePerl) via CW<:=$NAME:> and in pass 4 (GNU m4) via CWm4_NAME. A special variant --define=NAME=UNDEF does the opposite, it deletes previous definitions (which may be different than undefining these variables, e.g. with system defined variables).

-D, --define=NAME~PATH

Similar to the above but defines a variable holding a pathname which is autoadjusted (see below). It can be interpolated in the same ways as the CWNAME=STR variant from above.

-n, --noshebang

This forces WML to ignore a possibly contained shebang line in inputfile. This is usually used by WMk, because WMk already parsed this line and supplied the options to WML.

-r, --norcfile

This forces WML to ignore all .wmlrc files.

-c, --nocd

When WML processes an input file from another directory, it jumps into that directory before parsing .wmlrc files, and jump back to current directory after. If this option is set, no directory change is made and .wmlrc files are read reative to current working directory.

-O, --optimize=NUM

This is the optimization option which is passed directly to pass 8 (htmlfix). It controls the amount of optimization/stripping which is applied to the generated HTML markup code.

-o, --outputfile=SLICETERM:outputfile[@CHMODOPT]

This redirects the output to a file. Usually the whole file will be send to stdout (same as CWALL:-). You can use this option more than once to output to more than one file while using the SLICETERM as a set theory term of slices to determine which contents will be included into each particular output file. The optional CHMODOPT is intended for specifying options for a finally applied chmod command. For instance use ``CWu+x'' to create a file with the execution bit set (Apache's XBitHack feature). See slice(1) for more details.

-P, --prolog=PATH

Runs an prolog filter over the input file. This program receives the data to act on as STDIN and has to produce the filtered data on STDOUT.

-E, --epilog=PATH

Runs an epilogue program over the finally resulting output files. Currently the following WML-specific programs are known: htmlinfo, linklint, tidy and weblint. But you can specify any program which is available in your CWPATH. This program receives the file to act on as its first command line argument. Notice that output is not redirected to this file, so you have to use a wrapper or program specific flags if you want to modify output files.

-t, --settime

This sets the modification time of all output files to the modification time of intputfile plus 1 second. This is useful because Webservers will generate CWLast-Modified headers and there the editing time is more important than the generation time. The 1 second offset is for the dependencies of Makefiles.

-M, --depend[=OPTIONS]

Output a rule suitable for `make' describing the dependencies of each output file, as `gcc' does. It has only sense when the -o option is used. No processing is done except for the first pass. The D flag option writes the rule to a dependency file. The name of this file is obtained by replacing the suffix of the output file by .d. The M flag option deletes the system files from the list of dependencies.

-p, --pass=STR

Specifies which of the passes described above are actually applied under runtime. The argument STR is a comma-separated list of pass numbers with one special case: You can write CWX-Y for all passes CWX...Y. When pass 9 is not part of STR the resulting output is written to STDOUT. Default is the string ``CW1-9''.

-W, --passoption=NUM,STR

Set option STR for the pass NUM.

-s, --safe

This disables some Perl hacks inside WML which speedup processing by reducing the forking overhead when running the various passes. Without this option WML pre-compiles the passes 1,5,6,7,8 (which are written in Perl!) into a different namespace of the currently running Perl interpreter instead of running them externally via CWsystem(). The effect is that these programs are run from within the same Perl interpreter thus saving five CPU- and time-intensive CWfork()'s. The actual gain is between 2 and 4 seconds of processing time. Although experience showed that it works great, the theoretical problem still is, that this approach is somewhat risky due to internal Perl variable conflicts. Use this option to disable these speedups by forcing WML to use the safe CWfork() approach.

-v, --verbose[=NUM]

This sets verbose mode (from 1 to 9) where some processing information will be given on the console. Useful for debugging. This option also gets passed to some of the filtering programs. Default is no verbosity and just -v means -v1.

-q, --quiet

This sets quiet mode where the processing prop is no longer displayed. Use this option when running wml as a batch job. This option is automatically forced when inputfile is missing. Then WML automatically reads from stdin in quiet mode.

-V, --version[=NUM]

Gives the version identification string and disclaimer (no NUM or NUM >= 1), the WML build information (NUM >= 2) and the Perl build information (NUM >= 3). Use this option to get a brief description of your installed WML system, especially when reporting bugs to the author.

-h, --help

Prints the usage summary page.

The following variables are always defined by wml under runtime and are usually interpolated via <CWget-var NAME> inside Pass 2 and via CW$NAME in Pass 3.

WML_SRC_DIRNAME

The current working directory from where wml was started. An absolute Unix filesystem path.

WML_SRC_FILENAME

The name of the inputfile from the command line. Useful when running wml on a bulk of files and includefiles have to determine in which they are included.

WML_SRC_BASENAME

The basename of the inputfile, i.e. the CWWML_SRC_FILENAME, but with the extension already stripped.

WML_SRC_TIME

The last modification time of inputfile in CWtime() format. Useful inside footers when customized date format is needed.

WML_SRC_CTIME

The last modification time of inputfile in CWctime() format. Useful inside footers include files.

WML_SRC_ISOTIME

The last modification time of inputfile in ISO CWyyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss format. Useful inside footers include files.

WML_SRC_USERNAME

The Unix username of the user who own inputfile.

WML_SRC_REALNAME

The realname of the user who own inputfile.

WML_GEN_TIME

The current time of generation in CWtime() format. Useful inside footers when customized date format is needed.

WML_GEN_CTIME

The current time of generation in CWctime() format. Useful inside footers include files.

WML_GEN_ISOTIME

The current time of generation in ISO CWyyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss format. Useful inside footers include files.

WML_GEN_USERNAME

The Unix username of the user who runs the wml process.

WML_GEN_REALNAME

The realname of the user who runs the wml process.

WML_GEN_HOSTNAME

The name of the host on which the wml command runs.

WML_LOC_PREFIX

The location prefix where WML was installed to at built time.

WML_LOC_BINDIR

The directory where WML's binaries were installed to at built time.

WML_LOC_LIBDIR

The directory where WML's library files were installed to at built time.

WML_LOC_DATADIR

The directory where WML's data files were installed to at built time.

WML_LOC_MANDIR

The directory where WML's manual pages were installed to at built time.

WML_VERSION

The version identification string of WML. Use this for instance in HTML comments inside header includes to identify the generation tools version.

This variable can contain a string of options. Usually this is used by Bourne-Shell users like

  $ WMLOPTS="-DNAME1=VALUE2 -DNAME2=VALUE2"
  $ export WMLOPTS

  $ setenv WMLOPTS "-DNAME1=VALUE2 -DNAME2=VALUE2"

$HOME/.wmlrc and (../)*.wmlrc

These files can also contain option strings, one option per line. Usually the contents is one or more -D options, especially auto-adjusted ones:

  -DROOTREL~.
  -DROOTABS=http://thishost/thisarea/
     :
  -DNAME1=VALUE1
  -DNAME2=VALUE2
     :

WML is shipped with a standard set of include files. You can directly include them via

  #use wml::category::name

and read their own documentation via

  $ man wml::category::name

See wml::all(3) for a description of all available include files.

The WML control frontend provides a few special features on its own:

Shebang Line Support

WML recognizes a shebang line (``CW#!wml options'') in the .wml files and automatically adds options to its command line. This line is also used by WMk. Two special features in contrast to shebang lines for the Unix loader are available: WML's shebang line can be continued via a backslash character and the constructs CW%DIR and %<BASE> are interpolated (where CW%DIR is the path to the directory the source while resides and CW%BASE is the filename of the source file without any extension). Example:

  #!wml -o (ALL-LANG_*)+LANG_EN:%BASE.en.html \
        -o (ALL-LANG_*)+LANG_DE:%BASE.de.html

Data Protection Container Tag

WML provides an own internal container tag named CW<protect [pass=SPEC]>...CW</protect> which can be used to protect any type of data from being processed by any WML pass. When no CWpass attribute is given SPEC defaults to CW1-9. When you use CWpass then SPEC can be either CW#-, CW-#, CW#-# or a comma separated list of passes, while CW# can be between CW1 and CW9. Example:

   <script language="JavaScript">
   <protect pass=2>
   ...
   output = "<PRE><DIV ALIGN=\"CENTER\"><B>" + help_string + "</B></DIV></PRE>"
   ...
   </protect>
   </script>

Warning: Since WML 2.0.3, pass 1 includes extra stuff to help keeping information about line numbers relevant (a la cpp). So when writing

   <protect pass=2>
   #include 'foo'
   </protect>

these extra commands will not be interpreted during pass 2 and will remain on output. To suppress them, either compile with CW-W1,-N flag, or write

   <protect pass=2>
   #include 'foo' IPP_NOSYNCLINES
   </protect>

 Ralf S. Engelschall
 rse@engelschall.com
 www.engelschall.com

 Denis Barbier
 barbier@engelschall.com

wmd(1), wml_faq(7), wml_intro(7), wml_tutorial(7), wml_tags(7), wml::all(3).