Page 12 - PromptPal Documentations.

Adding / Changing Command Information Page 3 of 5

This dialog is used to edit existing commands, and also to add commands if the wizard has been disabled.
The dialog is in two halves. The upper section has two tabs labeled Specification and Switches. The lower section has
large edit box for entering the notes on command usage.

Specification Tab

Name
If you're adding a command, you'll need to enter the command name. Please enter the command free of any
parameters and switches, and also omit the associated file name extension (unless it it required to differentiate the
command from an identically named executable file with a different extension, .e.g. XXX.com and XXX.exe). For
example, let's say you're adding your favorite command-line utility: mycommand.exe. You'd launch this in the normal
command processor by typing simply "mycommand", so set the name as "mycommand" also.
If you're editing an existing command, the name cannot be changed. If the name is wrong, please cancel out of the
dialog, delete the command and recreate it.

Command Line Specifications
This field is used to enter the range of possible parameters and switches supported by the command. There may be
multiple different ways of issuing the command, so the field contains multiple lines and behaves in much the same
way as an Excel spreadsheet.
In your command's documentation, the command specification is often called the "usage". The text you enter for the
specification will be appear at the top of the Info bar when the command is recognized during editing. As an example,
here's the specification for the attrib command:
ATTRIB [+R | -R] [+A | -A ] [+S | -S] [+H | -H] [drive:][path][filename] [/S [/D]]
Path (Optional)
This is optional and is only used by the dialog if you invoke use the auto-discover function. Leave this blank if the
command can be found on the current "path" environment variable, otherwise please supply the full path to the
executable file. You can type in the path directly or browse to it.

Use path when executing this command (Optional)
This option only applies when you have supplied the full path to the command in the previous field. When the box is
ticked PromptPal will silently substitute the full path for the command whenever it is encountered. This makes it easier
to launch executables and batch files that do not reside in directories on the system's PATH environment variable.

Switches Tab

In PromptPal, "switches" are command-line options that are introduced with a special character such as "/", "-" or
sometimes "+". If switches are defined, PromptPal will display them in a popup list when you type the trigger
character during editing.
This part of the dialog behaves a lot like Excel - you can tab between the fields and navigate between rows using the
up/down arrow keys. Don't worry about the order of the switches - PromptPal sorts them when they're shown during
editing.

Notes
The notes section just holds information about how the command is used. It's displayed in the Info bar after the
command specifications (if any) and may repeat some the information from the other fields in the dialog.

Auto-Discover
Many commands are capable of displaying some helpful text about their usage, command line parameters and
switches. If your command can do this, PromptPal may be able to capture this help text and use it to fill out the
command information automatically. This process is called "Auto-discover".
If you decide to give auto-discover a try, you'll first have to tell PromptPal what command line parameter is used to
trigger the help text. The majority of commands output help text if they see "/?" on their launch line. Some others
recognize either "-h" or "-?", and some only output the text if there is nothing on the launch line at all. There's no
formal standard. Sometimes, the best you can do is make a guess and try it!
When you trigger auto-discover, PromptPal will try to get the help text from the command for a few seconds, and then

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