NAME¶

ngspice - circuit simulator derived from SPICE3f5

SYNOPSIS¶

ngspice [options] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION¶

This man page is just a small overview. The primary documentation of ngspice is in the ngspice User's Manual, which is available as a pdf file.

OPTIONS¶

-n or --no-spiceinit

Don't try to source the file ".spiceinit" upon startup. Normally ngspice tries to find the file in the current directory, and if it is not found then in the user's home directory.

-q or --completion

Enable command completion. (defect)

-t term or --term=term

The program is being run on a terminal with mfb name term.

-b or --batch

Run in batch mode. ngspice will read the standard input or the specified input file and do the simulation. Note that if the standard input is not a terminal, ngspice will default to batch mode, unless the -i flag is given.

-s or --server

Run in server mode. This is like batch mode, except that a temporary rawfile is used and then written to the standard output, preceded by a line with a single "@", after the simulation is done. This mode is used by the ngspice daemon.

-i or --interactive

Run in interactive mode. This is useful if the standard input is not a terminal but interactive mode is desired. Command completion is not available unless the standard input is a terminal, however.

-r rawfile or --rawfile=file

Use rawfile as the default file into which the results of the simulation are saved.

-c circuitfile or --circuitfile=circuitfile

Use circuitfile as the default input deck.

-h or --help

Display a verbose help on the arguments available to the program.

-v or --version

Display a version number and copyright information of the program.

-a or --autorun

FIXME

-o outfile or --output=outfile

All logs generated during a batch run (-b) will be saved in outfile.

-p or --pipe

Allow a program (e.g., xcircuit) to act as a GUI frontend for ngspice through a pipe. Thus ngspice will assume that the pipe is a tty and allows one to run in interactive mode.

Further arguments are taken to be SPICE input decks, which are read and saved. (If batch mode is requested then they are run immediately.)

ENVIRONMENT¶

SPICE_LIB_DIR

SPICE_EXEC_DIR

SPICE_HOST

SPICE_BUGADDR

SPICE_EDITOR

SPICE_ASCIIRAWFILE default 0

Format of the rawfile. 0 for binary, and 1 for ascii.

SPICE_NEWS default $SPICE_LIB_DIR/news

A file which is copied verbatim to stdout when ngspice starts in interactive mode.

SPICE_MFBCAP default $SPICE_LIB_DIR/mfbcap

SPICE_HELP_DIR default $SPICE_LIB_DIR/helpdir

SPICE_SCRIPTS default $SPICE_LIB_DIR/scripts

In this directory the spinit file will be searched.

SPICE_PATH default $SPICE_EXEC_DIR/ngspice

various undocumented ngspice centric environment variables :

NGSPICE_MEAS_PRECISION

SPICE_NO_DATASEG_CHECK

Common environment variables :

TERM LINES COLS DISPLAY HOME PATH EDITOR SHELL

POSIXLY_CORRECT

FILES¶

$SPICE_LIB_DIR/scripts/spinit

The System's Initialisation File.

.spiceinit or $HOME/.spiceinit

The User's Initialisation File.

SEE ALSO¶

sconvert(1), ngnutmeg(1), mfb(3), writedata(3), and
ngspice User's Manual at http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/docs.html

BUGS¶

Please report bugs to the ngspice project via
http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/bugrep.html

AUTHORS¶

spice3: Tom Quarles (quarles@cad.berkeley.edu)
nutmeg: User interface: Wayne Christopher (faustus@cad.berkeley.edu)
ngspice: various authors (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/ngspice/)