AmazonsGui can be invoked with the command:

java -jar amazonsgui.jar [options] [file]

using the file amazonsgui.jar in the lib subdirectory.

The command line for executing the actual Amazons program can be given with the -program option. Otherwise, AmazonsGui will start with the Amazons program attached in the previous session, or without Amazons program if none was attached. You can attach and detach a Amazons program at any time by using the Attach, New Program and Detach menu items from the Program menu.

For Unix systems, there are launcher scripts in the bin directory. The launcher scripts respect the environment variable AMAZONSGUI_JAVA_HOME, if defined, and look for the jar files in ../lib relative to the bin directory. You can add the bin directory of AmazonsGui to your PATH environment variable. The invocation is then simply:

amazonsgui [options] [file]

To register AmazonsGui as a handler for SGF files, you can configure a new file association for the type application/x-amazons-sgf and the file name pattern *.sgf to execute amazonsgui.

For Linux systems, there is a shell script install.sh in the main directory, which will install AmazonsGui on the system, including the creation of desktop menu entries, entries in the help system, and the registration as a handler for SGF files. This script needs to be run as root.

On Windows, the Java installation registers Java as a handler for jar-files and it is possible to launch AmazonsGui by double-clicking on amazonsgui.jar from a file browser. You can also drag a link to this file to the desktop.

On Mac OS X, AmazonsGui can be invoked using the UNIX launcher scripts in the bin directory. It is also possible to create an application bundle for Mac OS X by typing

ant amazonsgui.app

in the main directory. The resulting application bundle will be in build/AmazonsGui.app. This requires, that the Ant build system is installed on the system.