Getting Started

    The easiest way to learn and experiment with Julia is by starting an interactive session (also known as a read-eval-print loop or “REPL”) by double-clicking the Julia executable or running from the command line:

    To exit the interactive session, type CTRL-D (press the Control/^ key together with the d key), or type exit(). When run in interactive mode, julia displays a banner and prompts the user for input. Once the user has entered a complete expression, such as 1 + 2, and hits enter, the interactive session evaluates the expression and shows its value. If an expression is entered into an interactive session with a trailing semicolon, its value is not shown. The variable ans is bound to the value of the last evaluated expression whether it is shown or not. The ans variable is only bound in interactive sessions, not when Julia code is run in other ways.

    To evaluate expressions written in a source file file.jl, write include("file.jl").

    To run code in a file non-interactively, you can give it as the first argument to the julia command:

    1. $ julia script.jl arg1 arg2...

    Or you could put that code into a script and run it:

    1. $ echo 'println(PROGRAM_FILE); for x in ARGS; println(x); end' > script.jl
    2. script.jl
    3. foo
    4. bar

    The -- delimiter can be used to separate command-line arguments intended for the script file from arguments intended for Julia:

    See also Scripting for more information on writing Julia scripts.

    Julia can be started in parallel mode with either the -p or the --machine-file options. -p n will launch an additional n worker processes, while --machine-file file will launch a worker for each line in file file. The machines defined in file must be accessible via a password-less ssh login, with Julia installed at the same location as the current host. Each machine definition takes the form . user defaults to current user, port to the standard ssh port. count is the number of workers to spawn on the node, and defaults to 1. The optional bind-to bind_addr[:port] specifies the IP address and port that other workers should use to connect to this worker.

    1. $ julia
    2. Greetings! 你好! 안녕하세요?

    There are various ways to run Julia code and provide options, similar to those available for the perl and ruby programs:

    Julia 1.1

    In Julia 1.0, the default option did not search up from the root directory of a Git repository for the Project.toml file. From Julia 1.1 forward, it does.

    A curated list of useful learning resources to help new users get started can be found on the page of the main Julia web site.