

Make sure you put the full path in quotes! The OS doesn’t like spaces. Open a command prompt and type the path you want to use with dir in front. For windows, I do this with a dir command or ls for Linux. So before you contact support or start digging deeper into the documentation, make sure your paths are correct. Not having the right path specified in the command or as an environment variable is the number one reason why people have trouble running the program executables. In most cases, just use the full path to run the program, as in the examples below.

That has not changed since 2012 (actually, its been the same since 2002 or so). Scroll down to the section on paths in the original articles to learn details on what this means and how to do it. Most of that has been fixed in recent versions of Ansys, but it could be a problem. If things are not working, it could be because of paths. As an example, Ansys MAPDL is located here for 2022R1: C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v221\ansys\bin\win圆4\MAPDL.EXE When you execute a program on Windows or Linux, you have to tell the operating system where the executable is that you want to run. In such cases, you will be launching the executables from your program or script, and the path and the options are critical for this. Or maybe you created a vertical application that runs Ansys solvers in the background. Maybe you are doing a multi-tool optimization or a digital twin. One of the big changes over the past years is the use of Python or 3rd party programs to run Ansys solvers for you.

In this post, we will cover the basics for launching from the command line for the flagship products and also share where you can learn more in the Ansys documentation.

Some things are simpler, there are some new command line options, and there are a lot more products in the Ansys family. The need to run from the command line has not changed since we originally published this post in 2012. The original content is down at the bottom for reference. We have also included information for newer products. So we have taken the time to update the post to be correct for Ansys version 2022R1. And it turns out that this post is one of the top 10 posts that people are still accessing, having hundreds of visits a week from around the world. After we moved our website to its new home, we started tracking which blog posts were popular. Editor’s Note (): It’s time to update this article on launching from the command line.
