Nevis Local Software

These are commands developed or enhanced at Nevis for our own use. (Other sites, such as Fermilab, have defined their own versions of these commands, but apart from the name they have little in common.)

Initialization

In order to use these utilities, your UNIX environment must be set up properly. Normally, this is done for you when you login to the Nevis cluster for the first time.

If you suspect that there's something wrong with the initialization, you can check that the following line appears in the file .profile file which resides in your home directory:

source /usr/nevis/adm/nevis-init.sh

If you use tcsh, then you should check that the following line appears in your .cshrc file in your home directory:

source /usr/nevis/adm/nevis-init.csh

A simple way to look for this line is to type less ~/.profile (if you use a Bourne-type shell, the default at Nevis) or less ~/.cshrc (if you use a C-type shell). If the line is missing, then edit the file to include it. (I've set up a separate page on shells if you'd like to learn about about shells and start-up scripts.)

setup

The setup command was written at Nevis. It's generally used to modify the user's environment for software packages that are not part of a standard Linux installation, and to allow the user some software version control.

Here's an example. ROOT is a software package that is used by many physicists at Nevis. To use the "default" version of ROOT, you would type

setup root

If ROOT version 9.05/06 becomes available, you might type (perhaps)

setup root9

to use the newly-installed version.

To see a list of what software setup can control, and learn what the "default" versions are, just type setup. To keep track of when new software programs or versions are available, check the Nevis-linux mailing list.

If you want to set up several programs at once, you can list them all in one command: setup root3 geant4 java.

If you're having trouble with the setup command, especially if you're trying to use it in a batch job, check the FAQ.

unsetup

The unsetup command is the inverse of the setup command. If you are testing the new version of a program, and you decide that you don't like it, you can remove it using unsetup. For example, if you're testing ROOT 9.05/06 and you decide that it causes problems, you would type

unsetup root

to remove all references to ROOT from your system environment (or you could type setup root to revert back to the default version).