Hi,
I'm not aware of any escape mechanism that with prevent the conflict between perframe's $N substitution and the similar --script substitution.  However you can use a trick to preserve the "$1" for the perframe command to see.  Change your perframe command to:

perframe "coordset #1 $1" frames 24 format %03d range $2,$3,1 showCommands true
(i.e. the 'range' args are $2,$3 instead of $1,$2)

and change your script invocation to:

cx --script './a.cxc $1 2 3'

So that the $1 inside the script remains $1 for the perframe command to see.  Note the single quotes around the --script argument to prevent the shell from changing the $1.

--Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab


On Jun 24, 2025, at 3:22 PM, d--- via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Hey there

So I'm invoking some rendering jobs like this: `cx --script "./a.cxc 2 3"`

Inside a.cxc there's something like:

```
perframe "coordset #1 $1" frames 24 format %03d range $1,$2,1 showCommands true
```

Now the problem is that the script arguments in the script are all being replaced

So $1 in the perframe subcommand becomes "2" just like in the range option

I couldn't find documentation on a built-in escape mechanism yet

I tried "\$1" and "$$1" w/o success tho

Alternatives that I see are generating a list of script files that don't rely on substitution and have hard-coded frame offsets or ig I could also explore python scripting

Wanted to ask if there's a way to do it with escaping tho

Thanks!
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