2.1 Getting started

• start CQP by typing

  $ cqp -e

  in a shell window (the $ indicates a shell prompt)

• -e flag activates command-line editing features³
• optional -C flag activates colour highlighting (experimental)
• every CQP command must be terminated with a semicolon (;)
• when command-line editing is activated, CQP will automatically add a semicolon at the end of each input line if necessary; explicit ; characters are only necessary to separate multiple commands on a single line in this mode

• change the registry directory (where CQP will look for available corpora)

  > set Registry "/some/path/to/a/directory";

• list available corpora (in the current registry)

  > show corpora;

• get information about corpus (including corpus size in tokens)

  > info DICKENS;

  displays information file associated with the corpus, whose contents will vary (it is not created automatically)

• activate corpus for subsequent queries (use TAB key for name completion)

  [no corpus]> DICKENS;
DICKENS>

  in the following examples, the CQP command prompt is indicated by a > character

• list attributes of activated corpus (“context descriptor”)

  > show cd;