Specifying arguments

Gif Animator is quite flexible in how command line arguments can be specified.

Argument Names

The Gif Animator client supports two different prefixes for denoting a command line argument - a forward slash (/) or a hyphen (-).

For example, both of these arguments mean the same thing:

/format
-format

Argument Values

Many of Gif Animator 's command line arguments require a value following the argument name. Values can be prefixed with either a space ( ), an equals sign (=) or a colon (:)

As with the above example, the following three items are seen as the same by Gif Animator :

/format:png
/format=png
/format png

If an argument value contains a space, then the entire value must be surrounded with either single or double quotes. For example:

/ac "Created with Cyotek  Gif Animator "

Comments and blank lines

Comments and line breaks are not supported on command line switches passed directly to the command line tools, but only when loaded from an external file via the /LOAD switch.

In addition to directly specifying command line arguments, you can also store arguments in a file and load these in via the /LOAD switch. One of the benefits of using this method of supplying arguments is you can use multiple lines and include comments. To include a comment, just prefix the text with a semicolon (;). Gif Animator will treat the remainder of the line as a comment.

If an argument value requires the semicolon character, ensure the entire value is surrounded with double quotes. Gif Animator will then ignore any semicolons within the value.

The following is an example of using comments:

FullColourGIF.gif               ; open the file using the current working directory
/i                              ; display information on the opened file

Example Command Lines

All of the example command lines in this user manual are displayed using the extended format. However, you can still use these directly, for example in a batch file - just remove the comments and line breaks.