@Philipp Gühring: Are you suggesting that it worked prior to (or some time prior to) rev 8.3.368? I find it surprising because there should be no difference between reading commands off of the command line and reading commands out of a file. The only think I can think of is that the separation of commands into separate lines is at issue when using

cat

. Try putting all commands on one line separated by

;

or on multiple lines separated by

;\

(as magic interprets backslash-newline as a line continuation). Does that work?

I think that I had it working somewhere before 8.3.368, but I am not 100% sure. Could it be that the before or after the -rcfile parsing something changes the state of magic? I'll try to create a small reproducible example.

"checkpaint" should force the DRC engine to run as soon as you turn it on. "drc check" should be the equivalent of your suggested "drc invalidate"---it will invalidate DRC and re-run all checks. The commands you're using and their sequence appear to be correct. The other possibility is that all these commands are non-blocking (although I thought that "drc catchup" is supposed to be blocking). If so, it might reach the end of the script and exit without waiting for the DRC to finish---except that was what "drc catchup" is supposed to prevent. That was what made me wonder if it's an issue of how the commands are passed to stdin.

I tried adding checkpaint now, but it doesn't help. I also reduced the tcl file now to this minimum: load INV.mag ; select top cell ; drc check ; drc catchup ; drc count total ; exit

This is a suggestion for debugging, not a solution, but try adding a line

after 1000

(1 second forced delay).

Still doesn't work: load INV.mag ; select top cell ; drc check ; after 10000 ; drc catchup ; drc count total ; exit