ADEXL 1921 failed to start problem with virtuoso IC6.18

Which IC sub-version are you using? (Help->About will tell you this). Which OS are you running? If you can type "lsb_release -a" at the UNIX terminal, what does it report? Do you have "Xvfb" installed in Linux ("which Xvfb" from the UNIX prompt). The printf message suggests you must be using a pretty old bash version, so I'm wondering which OS you're using.

Andrew

"The printf message suggests you must be using a pretty old bash version, so I'm wondering which OS you're using."

your observation made me realise that the problem was probably not with the Cadence library dependencies or the OS but rather something I had done with the OS setup.

I had installed dash required for another application and this seems to have interfered somehow with the correct operations of virtuoso and particularly cdsXvfb-run.

The PDK I use requires tcsh,  Perhaps there is a way to tell Cadence to ignore bash, dash or anything else it does not want and just use the correct Unix shell what it needs in the start up script.

I thought env -u SHELL tcsh would do.

Anyway the problem has gone away.

The vast majority of the wrappers used in our tools use ksh which is pretty unambiguous - you either have it installed or not (and things will just not work if not installed). There are a relatively small number of commands that use /bin/sh - and in the case of cdsXvfb-run it is an extension of xvfb-run (which is also using /bin/sh). Potentially that could have been reimplemented using ksh but that was probably a more extensive change then just adding the additional code to the existing script.

I think quite a few things in general would fail if dash is replacing /bin/sh - most of the universe probably expects /bin/sh to be the "Bourne-Again Shell" rather than a POSIX-compliant Bourne Shell (which I think dash is).

Our scripts do indeed state which shell they are using in the shebang at the top; I think the problem here was just those that use /bin/sh suffer from some ambiguity as to which flavour is being used. There are a small number of explicit "csh" scripts, but these are all pretty old and I suspect they are fine with it being a traditional csh or the enhanced "tcsh" (I'm not sure whether the Berkeley csh is available on most Linux distributions - I've not checked).

Regards,

Andrew