Keean Schupke writes:

Surely both requirements can be satisfied if the programs arguments are made parameters of main:

main :: [String] -> IO ()

From info '(libc)Error Messages', about program_invocation_name and program_invocation_short_name:

*Portability Note:* These two variables are GNU extensions. If you want your program to work with non-GNU libraries, you must save the value of `argv[0]' in `main', and then strip off the directory names yourself. We added these extensions to make it possible to write self-contained error-reporting subroutines that require no explicit cooperation from `main'. This suggests that making global parameters available only as arguments of main would be a bad idea. But they should be settable, to account for the rare case of wanting to substitute something else to a library which reads them itself. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/