Updated October 2016; see History
ATE, being an A-Shell application, is actually launched via an ASHW32.EXE command line and thus supports all the same command line arguments as A-Shell (which see in the A-Shell Setup Guide). Additionally, there is one special argument, atecfg, described below.
The typical command line looks like this:
c:\ate\bin\ashw32.exe -i c:\ate\miame.ini -z -atecfg cfgname
-z is a standard A-Shell switch to make the main window invisible. In the case of ATE, this is just an aesthetic nicety that mainly only applies to in conjunction with -atecfg ? so that the initial configuration/connection dialog appears by itself, without any main window behind it.
-atecfg cfgname specifies the ATE configuration to connect with, or "?" to display the connection/configuration dialog and let the user choose a connection profile.
History
2016 September, A-Shell 6.3.1527: the -atecfg command line switch now supports a compound argument up to 1024 bytes long which can be used with the ashell-ate custom URL scheme to pass an ad-hoc configuration as a set of value=attrib pairs.