The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray).
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Opened by David Ronis - 2009-06-19
Last edited by Jim Holsenback - 2010-04-18
FS#35 - problem parsing +i option in povray-3.7.0.beta.32 on linux
The commands:
povray +i /home/ronis/Nm=500/povray.00001.pov
or
povray +i/home/ronis/Nm=500/povray.00001.pov
fail with: povray: this pre-release version of POV-Ray for Unix expires in 2 day(s) and 1 hour(s)
Failed to parse command-line option
Going to the directory and simply running: povray +i povray.00001.pov
works.
I came across this by accident trying to get emac’s povray mode to work; apparently it passes the full path name to povray.
I don’t think there is a problem in 3.6.1
This is probably mis-categorized.
Hmmm..... I see this hasn't been tiraged yet.
Note that the proper syntax is
with no blank in between; leaving out the blank only happens to work in case of the +i switch.
The problem here is a pathological path name, containing an equal sign ("="). Enclosing the full filename in quotes should solve the problem, as in:
(Note that this must be the actual parameter strings passed to POV-Ray; when called from a command shell, provisions must be made to make sure the quotes are not stripped by the shell.)
Without the quotes, POV-Ray 3.6 gags on this filename, too, although its error message is a bit more helpful.
That said, the documentation could be made a bit more explicit about the possibility to use quotes on the command line, including the associated pitfalls. (It does mention this possibility for .ini files in section 2.2.8.2 "Using INI Files", but things are easier there.)
Jim, I guess that falls into your lot. Shall we call it a feature request?
I'll open some additional feature requests to (a) improve error message output, and (b) make command line handling easier and more consistent with common practice (we seem to have potential there).
Thanks for the reply. The problem surfaced when I was using the povray-mode under emacs; normally I use the syntax you describe, and don't bother with the full path.
I'll see about hacking the emacs povray code to put in the quotes.
I started a talk page that has subsections "Setting POV-Ray Options" through "Using INI Files". Notice the yellow highlighted area at the beginning of the "Using INI Files" subsection. At first glance perhaps this issue could be addressed with something similar in one of the previous sections. If I've missed the mark here please feel free to offer any recalibration, either here or on the Wiki.
I really have no idea how this relates to me, and how it got assigned to me. I see that now one has commented on the talk page related to this so I'm closing this task as it seems additional feature requests have been anchored to address the real problem (better command line handling)