Oh dear, almost on a daily base I need to pass arguments from a shell script to gretl . Currently I am using the "scriptopt" option when executing the gretlcli client. A specific scriptopt ID retrieves some linked bundle where further information are stored -- which can be tedious to maintain. But just by luck I saw Jack's comment on this issue on stackoverflow from 2017: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44465980/13028724 I was never aware of both the getenv() and ngetenv() functions. But this makes a lot of stuff easier for me and maybe some other gretl users. Best, Artur