The name of the default database. You can change the database anytime during an interactive session.

Specify either a full path or . to use the current working directory for the output of the style specification and CSS files. The latter case is what you usually want if you run refdbib from the directory where your LaTeX or SMGL/XML document is stored. This is also the default if you do not specify a directory at all.

log-destination can have the values 0, 1, or 2, or the equivalent strings stderr, syslog, or file, respectively. This value specifies where the log information goes to. 0 (zero) means the messages are sent to stderr. They are immediately available on the screen but they may interfere with command output. 1 will send the output to the syslog facility. Keep in mind that syslog must be configured to accept log messages from user programs, see the syslog(8) man page for further information. Unix-like systems usually save these messages in /var/log/user.log. 2 will send the messages to a custom log file which can be specified with the -L option.

Select an output character encoding. If this option is not used, the bibliography data will use the character encoding of the database. See iconv_open(3) for a list of available encodings.

This is a crutch to make reading data from stdin possible on platforms that do not allow automatic detection of data on stdin, like Windows/Cygwin. On other platforms, refdbib automatically reads data from stdin if data are available.

Displays help and usage screen, then exits.

Set the IP address of the box which is running the application server refdbd(1). Instead of the IP address you can also specify the hostname as long as it can be properly resolved by your system.

Specify the priority up to which events are logged. This is either a number between 0 and 7 or one of the strings emerg, alert, crit, err, warning, notice, info, debug, respectively (see also Log level definitions). -1 disables logging completely. A low log level like 0 means that only the most critical messages are logged. A higher log level means that less critical events are logged as well. 7 will include debug messages. The latter can be verbose and abundant, so you want to avoid this log level unless you need to track down problems.

Specify the full path to a log file that will receive the log messages. Typically this would be /var/log/refdba.

This switch turns errors caused by missing references (i.e. cited but not available in the database) into warnings, causing refdbib to return 0 instead of an error code.

Use this option to specify where the numbering of the references is supposed to start. The default is 1. This option comes in handy if you need to cobble together composite bibliographies or per-chapter bibliographies that still need to be numbered consecutively.

Set the port of the box which is running the application server.

Start without reading the configuration files. The client will use the compile-time defaults for all values that you do not set with command-line switches.

Use this option to request a raw instead of a cooked bibliography. Raw bibliographies are not formatted in any way and are processed with the standard DocBook or TEI stylesheets instead of with the RefDB driver files.

Specifies the bibliography style. This controls the formatting of the bibliography and the in-text citations when the document is processed.

Select the output type. Use db31 to generate DocBook SGML bibliographies, db31x for DocBook XML bibliographies (DTD-based, up to 4.3), db50x for Docbook V5 XML bibliographies (schema-based), teix for TEI P4 XML bibliographies, tei5x for TEI P5 XML bibliographies, and bibtex for BibTeX bibliographies. The type of output also determines the type of style specification file, if any, that will be generated in addition to the bibliography for formatting purposes. This is only a matter of concern if you want to process a DocBook XML document with the DSSSL stylesheets: In this case you should use db31 with this option. The SGML bibliography element is also a valid XML element, but you will get a DSSSL driver file instead of a XSL driver file when you use db31x. Note: In the current implementation, the -t teix option will also return a DocBook bibliography which needs to be transformed to a TEI bibliography with the bibdb2tei.xsl stylesheet. The -t tei5x option creates a directly usable TEI bibliography.

Set the timeout for client/application server dialogue in seconds. A connection with unsuccessful read or write attempts will be considered as dead and taken down after this amount of time has elapsed.

Set the username for the database access. Note: This username need not be identical to the login name of the user. This is the username required to access the database server.

Prints version and copyright information, then exits.

Switches to verbose mode.

Set the password for the database access. Note: This password need not be identical to the login password of the user. This is the password required to access the database server.

Specify the directory where the global configuration files are Note: By default, all RefDB applications look for their configuration files in a directory that is specified during the configure step when building the package. That is, you don't need the -y option unless you use precompiled binaries in unusual locations, e.g. by relocating a rpm package.

The global configuration file of refdbib.

The user configuration file of refdbib.