jashkenas--coffeescript/documentation/sections/usage.md

Usage

Once installed, you should have access to the coffee command, which can execute scripts, compile .coffee files into .js, and provide an interactive REPL. The coffee command takes the following options:

Option	Description
-c, --compile	Compile a .coffee script into a .js JavaScript file of the same name.
-m, --map	Generate source maps alongside the compiled JavaScript files. Adds sourceMappingURL directives to the JavaScript as well.
-M, --inline-map	Just like --map, but include the source map directly in the compiled JavaScript files, rather than in a separate file.
-i, --interactive	Launch an interactive CoffeeScript session to try short snippets. Identical to calling coffee with no arguments.
-o, --output [DIR]	Write out all compiled JavaScript files into the specified directory. Use in conjunction with --compile or --watch.
-w, --watch	Watch files for changes, rerunning the specified command when any file is updated.
-p, --print	Instead of writing out the JavaScript as a file, print it directly to stdout.
-s, --stdio	Pipe in CoffeeScript to STDIN and get back JavaScript over STDOUT. Good for use with processes written in other languages. An example: `cat src/cake.coffee
-l, --literate	Parses the code as Literate CoffeeScript. You only need to specify this when passing in code directly over stdio, or using some sort of extension-less file name.
-e, --eval	Compile and print a little snippet of CoffeeScript directly from the command line. For example: coffee -e "console.log num for num in [10..1]"
-r, --require [MODULE]	require() the given module before starting the REPL or evaluating the code given with the --eval flag.
-b, --bare	Compile the JavaScript without the top-level function safety wrapper.
-t, --tokens	Instead of parsing the CoffeeScript, just lex it, and print out the token stream. Used for debugging the compiler.
-n, --nodes	Instead of compiling the CoffeeScript, just lex and parse it, and print out the parse tree. Used for debugging the compiler.
--nodejs	The node executable has some useful options you can set, such as --debug, --debug-brk, --max-stack-size, and --expose-gc. Use this flag to forward options directly to Node.js. To pass multiple flags, use --nodejs multiple times.
--no-header	Suppress the “Generated by CoffeeScript” header.

Examples:

• Compile a directory tree of .coffee files in src into a parallel tree of .js files in lib:
  coffee --compile --output lib/ src/
• Watch a file for changes, and recompile it every time the file is saved:
  coffee --watch --compile experimental.coffee
• Concatenate a list of files into a single script:
  coffee --join project.js --compile src/*.coffee
• Print out the compiled JS from a one-liner:
  coffee -bpe "alert i for i in [0..10]"
• All together now, watch and recompile an entire project as you work on it:
  coffee -o lib/ -cw src/
• Start the CoffeeScript REPL (Ctrl-D to exit, Ctrl-Vfor multi-line):
  coffee