Manual

Chapter 9: Invoking Bison 97
9 Invoking Bison
The usual way to invoke Bison is as follows:
bison infile
Here infile is the grammar file name, which usually ends in ‘.y’. The parser file’s name
is made by replacing the ‘.y’ with ‘.tab.c’ and removing any leading directory. Thus, the
‘bison foo.y’ file name yields ‘foo.tab.c’, and the ‘bison hack/foo.y’ file name yields
‘foo.tab.c’. It’s also possible, in case you are writing C++ code instead of C in your grammar
file, to name it ‘foo.ypp’ or ‘foo.y++’. Then, the output files will take an extension
like the given one as input (respectively ‘foo.tab.cpp’ and ‘foo.tab.c++’). This feature
takes effect with all options that manipulate file names like ‘-o’ or ‘-d’.
For example :
bison -d infile.yxx
will produce ‘infile.tab.cxx’ and ‘infile.tab.hxx’, and
bison -d -o output.c++ infile.y
will produce ‘output.c++’ and ‘outfile.h++’.
For compatibility with POSIX, the standard Bison distribution also contains a shell script
called yacc that invokes Bison with the ‘-y’ option.
9.1 Bison Options
Bison supports both traditional single-letter options and mnemonic long option names.
Long option names are indicated with ‘--’ instead of ‘-’. Abbreviations for option names
are allowed as long as they are unique. When a long option takes an argument, like
‘--file-prefix’, connect the option name and the argument with ‘=’.
Here is a list of options that can be used with Bison, alphabetized by short option. It is
followed by a cross key alphabetized by long option.
Operations modes:
‘-h’
‘--help’
Print a summary of the command-line options to Bison and exit.
‘-V’
‘--version’
Print the version number of Bison and exit.
‘--print-localedir’
Print the name of the directory containing locale-dependent data.
‘-y’
‘--yacc’
Act more like the traditional Yacc command. This can cause different diagnostics
to be generated, and may change behavior in other minor ways. Most
importantly, imitate Yacc’s output file name conventions, so that the parser
output file is called ‘y.tab.c’, and the other outputs are called ‘y.output’ and
‘y.tab.h’. Thus, the following shell script can substitute for Yacc, and the
Bison distribution contains such a script for compatibility with POSIX: