[Solved] Selecting wads from command line doesn't work

[pragmasaurus]

I've been using a portable USB frontend of dosbox (called "Dosbox Distro") that comes with a built in version of zdoom. The version is "ZDoom v2.6.999 - SVN revision 4023M - SDL version compiled on Jan 10 2013"

I don't have access to the source for this distro so as far as I know I can't update zdoom (is it even running in dos, or does this frontend call zdoom to run in linux?) . I also tried to reach out to the author of this project but got no response.

Anyways, my issue is that I can't seem to get command line arguments for zdoom working. I've tried both of:

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zdoom -iwad DOOM2.WAD
zdoom -file DOOM2.WAD

But either of these still brings me into a wad selection menu. When I select any wad from the list, it boots me back to the dosbox prompt. If I just run zdoom without any command line args and select a wad from the menu it works fine. The reason I want to be able to select a wad directly is because I'm trying to make a completely foolproof .bat menu for my kid.

Does this version not support command line, or is there some other way I can launch a different version of zdoom in this environment without having access to the source?

EDIT:

I resolved the issue. It turns out in this particular system, typing "zdoom" was calling a "zdoom.bat" which had it's own command line parameters, which unsurprisingly had to do with network play.

[wildweasel]

Assuming some kind of Linux, make sure the file name is accurate (Linux is a case-sensitive file system), and also try specifying the full path to the WAD file, or adding a ./ to the start of it to explicitly specify "current directory."

[pragmasaurus]

I tried both specifying the full path and using ./, with the same results as before (still going to the wad menu and then getting booted back to the dos prompt whenever a selection is made). Although I noticed that there was some text briefly on the screen before getting booted back, and here's what it says:

when using "zdoom -iwad DOOM2.WAD"

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W_Init: Init WADfiles.
     adding /usr/local/share/zdoom/zdoom.pk3, 559 lumps
     adding /home/tc/.config/zdoom/DOOM2.WAD, 2919 lumps
I_Init: Setting up machine state.
CPU Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
     Name: AMD FX(tm)-4170 Quad-Core Processor
     Family 21 (21), Model 1, Stepping 2
     Features: MMX MMX+ SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE4.1 SSE4.2
I_InitSound: Initializing FMOD
FMOD Sound System, copyright (c) Firelight Technologuies Pty. Ltd.. 1994-2009.
Loaded FMOD version 4.29.36
HOSS could not be initialized. Trying ALSA.
V_Init: allocate screen.
S_Init: Setting up sound.
ST_Init: Init startup screen.
Checking cmd-line parameters...
S_InitData: Load sound definitions.
G_ParseMapInfo: Load map definitions.
Texman.Init: Init texture manager.
ParseTeamInfo: Load team definitions.
LoadActors: Load actor definitions.
R_Init: Init Doom refresh subsystem.
DecalLibrary: Load decals.
M_Init: Init menus.
P_Init: Init Playloop state.
ParseSBarInfo: Loading default status bar definition.
ParseSBarInfo: Loading custom status bar definition.
D_CheckNetGame: Checking network game status.
gethostbyname: couldn't find DOOM2.WAD
Resource temporarily unavailable

when using "zdoom -iwad C:\ZDOOM\DOOM2.WAD", I get the same output, except the last few lines:

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...
ParseSBarInfo: Loading custom status bar definition.
D_CheckNetGame: Checking network game status.
Weird port: \ZDOOM\DOOM2.WAD (using 5029)
gethostbyname: couldn't find C
Resource temporarily unavailable

So it looks like it's crashing because it either can't find the wad, or can't find the drive. I guess this might be because dosbox is virtually mounting this C drive, and this instance of zdoom which presumably lives in linux can't see these files (or they're in a different location from its perspective). Any ideas how I might be able to work around this without access to the guts of this frontend?

[wildweasel]

These error messages are sounding as if ZDoom is interpreting your arguments as addresses to connect to, and not commands to load files. This is very strange and I'm not sure why it's doing that.