I have a bunch of tcl scripts that I use for command line use with magic, eg lvs. Is there a way to provide the name of the design via command line or environment variable?

There are several ways to do this; one is that you can run magic from a script with

<< EOG

followed by all the commands written inside the shell script so that you can do shell variable substitution. The other way is mentioned in the usage web page for magic:

(versions from 8.3.185) The behavior is the same as above, but if any TCL script is passed on the command line, then all arguments after the name of the TCL script are assumed to be arguments passed to the script and not input files to be processed by magic. The TCL script can see the whole command line argument list in the variable $argv (length $argc).

So you can just type, e.g.,

magic -dnull -noconsole myscript.tcl arg1 arg2 arg3

and then pick up those arguments from within the script using $argc and $argv as stated above.

thanks Tim

Great; I much prefer that to using environment variables.

image.png

Netgen and magic have the same interface (I made them the same way), so if netgen's isn't handling variables properly, it should be easy enough to track down and fix.

ok

I have a meeting in 3 minutes but I'll try to track the issue down later.

thanks

The issue is that "-batch" is followed by a command in netgen (which is a Tcl command), but there isn't a way to pass multiple commands. So "-batch source ..." can be used to execute multiple commands, except that Tcl doesn't allow arguments to be passed through the "source" command (seems like an oversight. . .). If you split into multiple Tcl commands, then you have to separate the commands with

;

, but the linux command line will grab it first and interpret it as a linux command separator. Anything you do to get rid of the delimiter like putting the command in quotes causes the command not to be seen as a command. But this works: File "test.tcl":

# Tcl file
puts stdout $myvar
puts stdout "that's all, folks!"
exit

Then do:

netgen -batch eval "set myvar hello ; source test.tcl"

So what I did was to put it in quotes to protect it from the shell, and then the command passed to netgen is now "eval", which evaluates the following string argument as a command.

ah, nice.

Hi @Matt Venn. I've solved the original problem using makefiles, and using the

define ... endef

construct. I hope you find it useful. https://github.com/akiles-esta-usado/ic-makefile/blob/main/magic.mk Are your scripts available to see? It could be great to find more use-cases for my project.

hey, looks good, thanks