Hurricane Tutorials are now online!
When creating a script to process many files it is important to make sure that no dialog boxes appear.
This is an issue if the command you want to use, uses a dialog box to request information from the user. A couple of these commands are LAYER and XREF (just to name a couple)
To call these commands and "suppress" the dialog boxes, AutoDesk was kind enough to have "command line only" versions of these commands. The LAYER command is replaced with -LAYER and the XREF command is replaced with -XREF (the only difference being the "-" sign.
Many other commands have this same functionality, however in newer versions of AutoCAD there are two that you DON'T have to worry about. They are OPEN and PLOT. When AutoCAD sees that it is running a script, it automatically suppresses the OPEN dialog box as well as the PLOT dialog box. So the question remains, how do you debug a PLOT script then, when you are NOT running a script, but just typing it in?
-PLOT will suppress the plot dialog box and present you with a multitude of command-line based options.
To see a list of commands that also have a "Command Line" version, click Which AutoCAD commands have command-line functionality?
You can also play with system variables, but I don't recommend that, as these variables eventually have to be reset.
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