Programming Groovy 2

1.5 Running Groovy on the Command Line

Of course, for some programmers nothing can give as much pleasure as getting into the command line and running the program from there. We can do that by typing the command ​groovy​ followed by the Groovy program filename, as shown next.

> cat Hello.groovy
println "Hello Groovy!"
> groovy Hello
Hello Groovy!
>

To try a couple of statements directly on the command line, use the ​-e​ option. Type ​groovy -e "println ’hello’"​ on the command line, and press ​Enter/Return​ . Groovy will output “hello.”

Realistically, though, the ​groovy​ command is useful for executing large Groovy scripts and classes. It expects us to either have some executable code outside any class, or have a class with a ​static ...