[Lazarus] Startup environment: to Gui, or not to GUI?

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Apologies if this is an FAQ.

Is there an orthodox way that a Lazarus program can very early on look 
at how it's been started and decide whether it can usefully fall back to 
a text mode, e.g. to display help info on stdout rather than a messagebox?

I'm tinkering with something (a media test program for SDCards etc.) 
which I'd like to either run as a conventional console program, or using 
a GUI. I've previously written stuff where operation was entirely 
dependant on command-line options, but haven't tried making the decision 
completely automatically.

Current operating environment is KDE on Debian on an RPi.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]