Command line options

Normally, all of the Squid configuration options reside with in the squid.conf file (the main Squid configuration file). To tweak the Squid functionality, the preferred method is to change the options in the squid.conf file. However there are some options which can also be controlled using additional command line options while running Squid.

These options are not very popular and are rarely used, but these are very useful for debugging problems without the Squid proxy server. Before exploring the command line options, let's see how Squid is run from the command line.

As we saw in the first chapter, the location of the Squid binary file depends on the --prefix option passed to the configure command before compiling. So, depending upon the value of the --prefix option, the location of the Squid executable may be one of /usr/local/sbin/squid or ${prefix}/sbin/squid, where ${prefix} is the value of the option --prefix passed to the configure command. Therefore, to run Squid...