Using the Command-Line Version of ProB

The command-line version of ProB offers many of the feature of the standalone Tcl/Tk Version via the command-line. As such, you can run ProB from your shell scripts or in your Makefiles.

Conventions used

The following conventions are used in this guide:

<replaceme>	All values that should be replaced with some value are shown withing < >
line breaks	Command synopsis for command may be broken up on several lines. When typing commands enter all option on the same line.

Synopsis

probcli [--help]
<filename> [ <options> ]

Command-line Arguments for ProB Tcl/Tk

Note that the stand-alone Tcl/Tk version also supports a limited form of command-line preferences:

FILE (the name/path of the file to be loaded)
-prefs PREF_FILE (to use a specific preferences file, rather than the default ProB_Preferences.pl in your home folder)
-batch (to instruct ProB not to try to bring up windows, but to print information only to the terminal)
-selfcheck (to run the standard unit tests)
-t (to perform the Trace Check on the default trace file associated with the specification)
-tcl TCL_Command (to run a particular pre-defined Tcl command)
-mc (to perform model checking)
-c (to compute the coverage)
-ref (to perform the default trace refinment check)

However, the comand-line version of ProB, called probcli, provides more features. It also does not depend on Tcl/Tk and can therefore be run on systems without Tcl/Tk.

Options

-mc <nr>

Description

model check; checking at most <nr> states

Example

probcli my.mch -mc 5

-no<x>

Description

<x>=dead,inv,goal,ass (for model check)

Example

probcli my.mch -noinv

Some probcli examples

To load a file My.mch, setup the constants and initialize it do:

probcli -init My.mch

To load a file M.mch, setup the constants, initialize and then check all assertions with Atelier-B's default values for MININT and MAXINT and an increased timeout of 5 seconds do:

probcli -init -assertions -p MAXINT 2147483647 -p MININT -2147483647 -p TIME_OUT 5000 M.mch