2.10 CQP scripts

• CQP commands do not have to be entered interactively at the prompt, they can also be collected in a text file (a CQP script)
• every command in a CQP script must be terminated with ; (whereas the terminator is optional in interactive CQP with command-line editing enabled)
• consider a text file script.txt containing the lines below

  ## use comment lines to structure and document the script
  DICKENS; # activate corpus
  set Context 30; # 30 chars of left/right context
  [lemma = "dog" & pos = "NN.*"]; # find noun DOG
  sort by word %c on matchend[1] .. matchend[42]; # sort by right context
  

• you can execute this script from the command line; it will print out a concordance for the noun dog in corpus order, then sorted by right context

  $ cqp -f script.txt

• new in CQP v3.4.22: CQP scripts can also be executed from an interactive session

  > source "script.txt";

• always keep in mind that the script does not run in a localized environment; any changes made by the script will persist in the interactive sessions

• the source command can also be executed in a CQP script; this can be used to structure complex scripts into sub-modules in separate script files

• scripts do not accept arguments, but they can often be emulated with the help of CQP macros (see Sec. 6.4)