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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.

-y

--yacc

--fixed-output-files

Equivalent to -o y.tab.c; the parser output file is called y.tab.c, and the other outputs are called y.output and y.tab.h. The purpose of this option is to imitate Yacc's output file name conventions. Thus, the following shell script can substitute for Yacc:

bison -y $*

Tuning the parser:

-S file

--skeleton=file

Specify the skeleton to use. You probably don't need this option unless you are developing Bison.

-t

--debug

In the parser file, define the macro YYDEBUG to 1 if it is not already defined, so that the debugging facilities are compiled. See Debugging Your Parser.

--locations

Pretend that %locations was specified. See Decl Summary.

-p prefix

--name-prefix=prefix

Pretend that %name-prefix="prefix" was specified. See Decl Summary.

-l

--no-lines

Don't put any #line preprocessor commands in the parser file. Ordinarily Bison puts them in the parser file so that the C compiler and debuggers will associate errors with your source file, the grammar file. This option causes them to associate errors with the parser file, treating it as an independent source file in its own right.

-n

--no-parser

Pretend that %no-parser was specified. See Decl Summary.

-k

--token-table

Pretend that %token-table was specified. See Decl Summary.

Adjust the output:

-d

--defines

Pretend that %defines was specified, i.e., write an extra output file containing macro definitions for the token type names defined in the grammar and the semantic value type YYSTYPE, as well as a few extern variable declarations. See Decl Summary.

--defines=defines-file

Same as above, but save in the file defines-file.

-b file-prefix

--file-prefix=prefix

Pretend that %verbose was specified, i.e, specify prefix to use for all Bison output file names. See Decl Summary.

-v

--verbose

Pretend that %verbose was specified, i.e, write an extra output file containing verbose descriptions of the grammar and parser. See Decl Summary.

-o filename

--output=filename

Specify the filename for the parser file.

The other output files' names are constructed from filename as described under the -v and -d options.

-g

Output a VCG definition of the LALR(1) grammar automaton computed by Bison. If the grammar file is foo.y, the VCG output file will be foo.vcg.

--graph=graph-file

The behaviour of -graph is the same than -g. The only difference is that it has an optionnal argument which is the name of the output graph filename.