Can/Should I use '\jobname' to pass information from outside LaTeX?

Question

I'm creating a parameterized document.

I want to pass a string into the document from outside at 'compile time'. In particular: a comma-separated list. This list will then be used by LaTeX to resolve internal conditionals. So, depending on the list, some parts of the document will be included and others will not.

Preferably, I'd like to pass the list as a simple command line parameter. My first thought would be to use the -jobname parameter and retrieve the info from the \jobname macro:

> pdflatex input.tex -jobname "a, b, e, g"

Is this an acceptable solution? Could it break anything? Are there perhaps popular packages out there that require \jobname to contain the input filename?

Or to generalize my question: how would you pass such information into the document?

Answer 1

This will most likely break everything, \jobname is used for all kinds of things like aux files and having commas and spaces in file names is tricky. Just use

  pdflatex \def\mycommand{a,b,c}\input myfile

possibly needing to quote the \ or {} depending on your commandline processor.