Reading Scala command line arguments

Scala command line FAQ: How do I read command line arguments (args) in a Scala shell script?

If your Scala shell script is very short, and you're not using an object or class declaration -- i.e., you have no main method -- you can access the script's command line arguments through the default args array, which is made available to you by Scala.

For instance, you can create a one-line Scala script named hello.scala like this:

println("Hello, " + args(0))

and then run the script like this:

scala hello.scala Al

and your output will look like this:

Hello, Al

As you can see, the command line arguments are accessed in Scala's array syntax, so the elements are args(0), args(1), etc.

Command line arguments with a Scala object

If you're using a Scala object in your shell script, you can still access the command line arguments using the args array, but in this case you just name the array args by convention:

object Foo {
  def main(args: Array[String]) = {
    println("Hello, " + args(0))
  }
}

You don't have to name the array "args", and in fact, you can name it whatever you'd like.

Looping through the Scala args array

As a reminder to myself more than anything else, if you want to loop through the Scala args array, there are several ways to do this, including these examples:

args.foreach(arg => println(arg))

// shorter
args.foreach(println(_))

// even shorter - if function literal consists of one
// statement that takes a single argument, you can do this:
args.foreach(println)

Scala shell script

As a final note, if you want to wrap your Scala script in a Unix/Linux shell script so you can easily execute it from the command line, take a look at my Scala shell script wrapper example. It shows the proper syntax for creating a "hello.sh" shell script that you can execute just like any other (normal) shell script.

I hope these tips on accessing command line arguments in your Scala scripts has been helpful.