This class processes the command line arguments for SKIRT and invokes the appropriate high-level functions to perform the actions requested by the user. When invoked with invalid command line arguments, it prints a brief help message. When invoked without any arguments, it enters interactive mode, constructing a simulation from the user's responses and saving the result in a ski file, without actually performing the simulation. Otherwise, it runs the simulations in the ski files specified on the command line according to the following syntax:
skirt [-t <threads>] [-s <simulations>] [-d]
[-b] [-v] [-m] [-e]
[-k] [-i <dirpath>] [-o <dirpath>]
[-r] {<filepath>}*
- The -t option specifies the number of parallel threads for each simulation. The default value is the number of logical cores on the computer running SKIRT.
- The -s option specifies the number of simulations to be executed in parallel. The default value is one.
- The -d option enables data parallelization mode for multiple processes.
- The -b option forces brief console logging, i.e. only success and error messages are shown rather than all progress messages. If there are multiple parallel simulations (see the -s option), the -b option is turned on automatically to avoid a plethora of randomly intermixing messages. If there is only one simulation at a time, the console shows all messages unless the -b option is present. In any case, the complete log output for each simulation is always written to a file in the output directory.
- The -v option enables verbose logging for simulations running with multiple processes, causing each process to create its own log file rather than relying on the root process to log all relevant information. The individual log files then also include messages bracketing each MPI operation, facilitating the diagnose of issues related to communication between the processes.
- The -m option causes information on current memory usage to be included in each log message.
- The -e option activates emulation mode, which can be used to estimate the amount of memory used by a given simulation without actually performing the simulation.
- The -k option causes the simulation input/output paths to be relative to the ski file being processed, rather than to the current directory. This is useful, for example, when processing multiple ski files organized in a nested directory hierarchy (see the -r option).
- The -i option specifies the absolute or relative path for simulation input files.
- The -o option specifies the absolute or relative path for simulation output files.
- The -r option causes recursive directory descent for all specified <filepath> arguments, in other words all directories inside the specified base paths are searched for the specified filename (or filename pattern).
In the simplest case, a <filepath> argument specifies the relative or absolute file path for a single ski file, with or without the ".ski" filename extension. However the filename (not the base path) may also contain ? and * wildcards forming a pattern to match multiple files. If the -r option is present, all directories recursively nested within the base path are searched as well, using the same filename pattern. If the filename contains wildcards or the -r option is present (in other words, if the filepath may match multiple files) the ".ski" filename extension is not automatically added. Furthermore, filepaths containing wildcards should be enclosed in quotes on the command line to avoid expansion of the wildcard pattern by the shell.
For example, to process all "test" ski files inside the "geometry" directory hierarchy, one could specify:
skirt -s 4 -t 1 -r "/root-test-file-path/geometry/test*.ski"
