[26749] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 9.4.22: chemkin_v3.7
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Wed Feb 22 17:42:58 2006
Message-Id: <200602222242.k1MMgFsJ001126@dit.mit.edu>
To: cda@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[26748] in Athena Bugs"
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:42:15 -0500
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>
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Cc: alexp@mit.edu, bugs@mit.edu
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Hi,
>What were you trying to do?
>
>An OLC user is trying to use chemkin 3.7 under Athena Linux.
>
>What's wrong:
>
>I am not 100% familiar with chemkin, as it isn't supported by OLC,
>but the user says that he needs the following line in his .cshrc.mine
>in order to enable chemkin to be launched from matlab automatically:
>
>source /mit/chemkin_v3.7/cshrc
>
>The file in question contains the line:
>
>rm -f ${HOME}/reaction/chemkin37
>
>The user claims he must save his work under this directory in order
>for it to function in matlab, and so this is destroying his work
>every time he opens a new xterm (or it gives an error message about
>not being able to remove that directory).
>I (naively, as my skill at plowing through shell scripts is not large)
>suggested he copy /mit/chemkin_v3.7/cshrc to his home directory, comment
>out the "rm" line, and source that file instead. But I'm surprised the
>problem just arose now, since he has been using chemkin 3.7 for a while.
Nothing in the CHEMKIN 3.7 locker has changed in over 2.5 years..
This wouldn't be sdbrad by any chance- would it? I went through several
iterations of trying to explain that CHEMKIN isn't intended to be run from
within Matlab, nor is it supported in that mode. Users really should be
using CHEMKIN 4 anyway, as you allude to. 3.7 is very old and won't stay around
forever...
That said, I'll try to help to the extent that I can supply useful information.
${HOME}/reaction/chemkin37 isn't a directory- it's a symlink, pointing to a
platform-specific configuration directory because CHEMKIN configuration files
are platform specific, i.e. on my Sun:
athena% ls -la ${HOME}/reaction/chemkin37
lrwxr-xr-x 1 alexp mit 15 Feb 22 17:13 /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/a/l/alexp/reaction/chemkin37 -> .chemkin37.sun4/
It gets deleted and recreated on each launch to make sure it points to the
correct platform-specific real directory each time (in case the user has
switched platforms)- on Linux, the real directory is .chemkin37.linux.
If the user stays on one platform (Sun or Linux), it should be fine to
delete that line, as long as the user makes the symlink by hand and has it
pointing to the right place. I don't see why this caused a problem anyway
because the link is recreated in the next line after the rm.
If the user has further problems, the response I would make is that
we're sorry but the application wasn't intended to be used in this way
and we can't support problems that come up when they try to do this
(perhaps they might find someone in SIPB who might be willing to
assist them further in hacking a copy of the launch script).
Alex
