What’s the meaning of a dash or hyphen “-” before the name of a command ?

Sometimes we can see a hyphen before a command name, then what’s the difference between a command with and without the hyphen?

Actually, the CAD system provides two modes in displaying prompts and options: Command Line and Dialog Boxes. The hyphen “-” issues the command line version of a command without popping up any dialog boxes.

Let’s take the following commands as examples of how dialog boxes and command line are different.

1. Dimension Style

Enter “D” or “DIMSTYLE”, then press Enter key to pop up the “Dimension Style Manager” dialog box,

We can create, modify or compare dimension styles using the dialog box. However, as we can see, there are so many options and parameters that it would be inconvenient to pack them all into the command line,

If we put “-”  before “DIMSTYLE” to issue the command line version of it, as shown in the following picture,

We can see that the options are displayed on the command line instead of using a dialog box. And the options are quite different from those in the dialog box,

2. Xref

Some operations about Xref are more convenient using command line such as reload and bind.

To reload all xref files

Enter “-XREF”, press Enter key to issue the command line version, then enter “R (RELOAD)” and press Enter key,

Then we are prompted to input Xref to be reloaded, we can also reload all Xrefs, as shown in the following picture,

To bind all Xref files

Enter -XREF and press Enter key, then enter B (BIND) and press Enter key, we’re prompted to input Xref name to bind, or we can also bind all Xrefs.