Specify output filename on command line

Question

Could you please consider making it possible to specify the exact output filename on the command line, similar to gcc option -o. This would make it easier to integrate plantuml in a build pipeline.

Answer 1

Hello A., and all,

• What is your use-case?

For example you can use:

cat filename.puml | java -jar plantuml.jar -pipe > anotherfilename.png

See also doc. here:

• https://plantuml.com/command-line

Regards.

Comments

I know what he is getting at...

Shell pipes do not work with some build pipelines (it does with a lot of them out there)...

So effectively... how does one get this to work without the "|" and ">" characters.

Or... how do you specify input and output files in the command line.

Also using shell hacks like what you posted is an antipattern in pipelines.

---

How can I process multiple puml files and still specify output filename.

I would need to run planuml in parallel currently with the pipe approach which is not very good in performance.

It would be great to have a option like --keep-filename which does not change the filename of the file to the plantuml title and put it in the same filepath (just with different file-ending). In case there are multiple diagrams in one puml it should fail with this parameter. Eg.:
java -jar plantuml.jar file1 file2 file3 --keep-filename

An alternative would be to specify an output filename for each file. Eg.:
java -jar plantuml.jar file1input.puml file1output.png file2input.puml file2output.png --specify-output-filename