Issue in the dot commands of the REPL

[gluzandii]

Upon using the DOT commands of .help and .exit, a parsing error shows up instead of actually running the. commands.

To reproduce this, just run the boa JavaScript runtime normally.
The command I used: cargo run --jobs 28

What was supposed to happen is it will exit upon using .exit or show the help for .help

• OS: macOS
• Version: 26.3.1 (a)
• Target triple: aarch64-apple-darwin
• Rustc version: 1.94.0 (4a4ef493e 2026-03-02)

[Sayeem3051]

Hi, I’d like to work on this issue.
From a quick look, it seems the REPL is forwarding .exit / .help to the JS parser instead of treating them as meta-commands.
My plan is to add early handling of dot-prefixed commands in the REPL input loop (e.g. match on .exit, .help, etc.), so they don’t go through the parser, and add tests to cover these commands.
Does this approach sound reasonable?

[gluzandii]

Hi @Sayeem3051, I'm already working on this issue since I opened it.

Thank you.