One of the challenges I had with Common Lisp initially was using it write standalone programs. I've gotten a chance now to build several, and I'll share some of the stuff I've learned. I'm still fairly new to Lisp, and I'm certain there are a number of drawbacks, but this helped make Lisp more useful to me and there to start using it more. This does assume you have a Quicklisp-enabled Common Lisp environment.

The first step is to write in the code to parse command line options. Fortunately, There is a Lisp implementation of Getopt available via Quicklisp (or via it's author).

Just as with the C and Python versions of the library (and possibly others), the Getopt library provides the getopt function. The first thing you probably want to do is define your options. The flag definition is a little different and is a list of lists; each sublist has two elements, '(flag argument-specifier. These specifiers are one of:

• :none - the option takes no arguments
• :optional - the option may take an argument
• :required - option requires an argument

Note that if an option requires an argument, and one isn't passed, the option is ignored. For example, if we had '("f" :required) in our options, and the program was called with /path/to/foo -f, the f would just be ignored and skipped over.

As an example, let's write a program that fetches a web page, similar to curl or wget. We'll use the options -h to print a help message and -o <filename> to write the url to a file. For simplicity's sake, we'll only accept the first argument as the url to download.

A typical session might look like this:

<onosendai: ~> $ url-fetch -o macro.lisp http://weitz.de/macros.lisp
<onosendai: ~> $ ls macros.lisp
macros.lisp

This is a very basic version to highlight building a CLI, so it doesn't do anything fancy like change 'weitz.de/macros.lisp' to 'http://weitz.de/macros.lisp' (drakma requires the protocol to be specified), and the sample code doesn't handle errors well: it will just dump to the debugger. The topic of error handling is best described elsewhere, and this example program is just the bare minimum to illustrate the point. With those caveats, let's look at an example main function to handle command line arguments:

    (defparameter *opts* '(("o" :required)
                           ("h" :none)))

    (defun main ()
      (let ((argv (subeq sb-ext:*posix-argv* 1))
            (write-to-file nil))
        (multiple-value-bind (args opts)
            (getopt:getopt argv *opts*)
          (when (empty-p (car arg))
            (help-message))
          (dolist (opt opts)
            (case (car opt)
              ("h" (help-message))
              ("o" (setf write-to-file (cdr opt)))))
          (fetch-url (car arg) write-to-file))))

Setting argv to everything after the first argument will skip the program name; this is just for convenience and isn't strictly required. It does, however, make the car of the argument list the first argument passed in. As getopt returns multiple values, we'll want to use multiple-value-bind to get at the opts and args. Note that args is a list of strings containing the arguments, and opts is an assoc list. For example, a typical return might be:

    (multiple-value-bind (args opts)
        (getopt:getopt argv *opts*)
      (format t "args: ~A~%opts: ~A~%" args opts))
    args: (http://weitz.de/macros.lisp)
    opts: ((o . macros.lisp))

If no args are passed in, a help message is printed (which also exits):

    (defun help-message ()
      (format t "usage: ~A [-h] [-o filename] url~%" (car sb-ext:*posix-argv*))
      (format t "options:~%")
      (format t "    -h            print this help message~%")
      (format t "    -o filename   write url to filename~%~%")
      (sb-ext:quit :unix-status 0))

This function is fairly standard, except possibly for the last line. sb-ext is a package containing SBCL's extensions. We saw this package earlier with sb-ext:*posix-argv*, which is simply a list of all the arguments passed in. In this case, sb-ext:quit exits from the image; the unix-status keyword sets the standard UNIX return value. You can use this to safely terminate the image.

I've elided the actual download components, but assuming they are in place (using the function names in the main function), we can build our image. The relevant function is sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die, and it's usage is fairly simple:

    (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die (pathname "~/bin/url-fetch")
                              :executable t
                              :toplevel #'url-fetch:main)

The executable keyword creates a standalone executable when true, and the toplevel keyword specifies the function to run when the image starts up.

We can write a utility function to take a list of Quicklisp packages, an image name, and a toplevel function and use that to build an image.

    (defun build-image (dep-list image-name toplevel)
      (dolist (dep dep-list)
        (ql:quickload dep))
      (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die (pathname image-name)
                                :executable t
                                :toplevel toplevel))

This is a fairly rough guide, but it should help to get you started. The example code is available on Bitbucket.