It needs to be something that is compatible with the BaseX command-line client. I don't think your proposed approach currently is.

In other words, I'd like to be able to prepare, inspect, backup, and restore a database from the command line.

Currently, this:

java -Duser.home=../../../../WEB-INF -cp ../../../../WEB-INF/lib/BaseX61.jar org.basex.BaseX <command here>

works because everything is tied to user.home

Also, I don't want to have to learn the meaning of individual parameters in .basex, so perhaps specifying the location of this file in an initialization call might be good?

Related to .basex, the file says it's "overwritten every time" - but it's not clear which point in time "every time" refers to.

 - Godmar