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Opening a file using a specific program doesn't produce output

First of all, I am new to coding, and I have looked for similar questions and I know some commands which can be used in Python and in CMD to open a file using an executable. The problem I'm having is that when I try to use those commands, the program runs without any error, but it doesn't give the output file that should give. On the other hand, when I just double click the file, which is set to open with *.exe, it works and produces the output.
I tried the CMD command:
start "path of .exe" "filepath"
also just:
"path of .exe" "filepath"
Then I tried the os and subprocess modules in python:
subprocess.Popen(...)
os.system(...)
subprocess.run(...)
and many other solution I found on the internet. The point is that all of these solution don't give errors and should work, but they don't produce the wanted file for me. I used the same commands on another file with a different .exe and they work.
This is the step that is not working in my attempt to automate a whole process. If someone is willing to take a look at the files, you can download them from the following link:
https://gofile.io/?c=5TJtS9
The files are as follows:
1. running the rdam.grd file with hist_dam2d.exe produces the hist.plotps file
2. then running the hist.plotps with plotps.exe produces the wanted diagram
It should be an easy task that doesn't work for me.
For more information... This is part a random finite element software which is freely distributed by the authors. You can see the whole documentation and download all parts of the program from this link:
http://random.engmath.dal.ca/rfem/
The parts that are causing the problem are used just for extracting and showing results.
It is an old software so maybe there is some problem with that.

I don't know what exactly you did with your Python code since you didn't provide the exact code snippets. I also don't have the reputation to comment. So I'll just provide code examples for the 3 methods you listed (CMD, Powershell, Python). All three methods worked on my machine.
1) CMD
start "" "plotps.exe" hist.plotps
The double quotes after the start keyword are there to specify an optional title. What went wrong in your CMD example is that windows thought "plotps.exe" was the title. You don't need to specify a title, but you need to write the quotes. More info on this keyword can be found here: https://ss64.com/nt/start.html
Also note that start is asynchronous
A synchronous way of doing it would be:
plotps.exe hist.plotps
2) Powershell
Start-Process -FilePath "plotps.exe" -ArgumentList "hist.plotps"
I would strongly recommend using powershell over CMD if you have access to both.
This method is synchronous.
More info on Start-Process: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/Microsoft.PowerShell.Management/Start-Process?view=powershell-5.0
3) Python
I'm not a python expert but this worked for me:
import subprocess
subprocess.call(['plotps.exe', 'hist.plotps'])

Code inside of a python file deleted

The code inside of a python file randomly deleted, is there anyway to restore? It is a file of 3.70 KB but when opened and put into a text document there is nothing.

Open with python to see what it contains
with open('deleted.py', 'rb') as f:
print(repr(f.read()))

Since you are a new user I am assuming you are new to code development etc. Therefore, you should look at some versioning control tools like:
SVN
Github
Gitlab
There are some more, but these are the most common ones. They are used to store your code and to revert you code if you mess up. They are also used to merge codes when different programmers are changing it. For the moment this will not help but will help in the future.
For now you may look at some restore tools but I highly doubt it that you are able to recreate the file. Another possiblity is: when you haven IDE to look at your command history. Maybe you executed the script and you can find the executed script as commands in the command history.

error with Xyce Gnuplot.py

I am using Xyce which is a circuit simulator. I am using it to export a .CSV file and a .prn file. I found Xycegnuplot.py "https://github.com/OpenXyce/Xyce/blob/master/utils/gnuplotXyce.py". I am trying to use it to plot my output variables from Xyce, howver, every time I run gnuplotXyce.py as mentioned by its author I get an error " Import Error" at the "from finblock import findblock" line and I don't know what is that error.
Please help.
Thanks

If you are going to use Xyce, you should probably get the official version from Sandia National Laboratories instead of from the OpenXyce site on github. This version was forked by an anonymous github user, and has not been updated since last fall. Since that update, Sandia released Xyce 6.2 and the OpenXyce creator did not import the new release.
You should also probably join the xyce-users group on googlegroups, where the Xyce developers monitor all questions and try to answer them promptly. It is only by happenstance that I found your question here on stackoverflow.
The "gnuplotXyce.py" script is not really maintained, and might not have been kept working with all the changes that have been made to Xyce since its release. That said, the python script depends on a number of python modules including gnuplot-py which should be available from http://gnuplot-py.sourceforge.net. The "findblock.py" module that you say cannot be found is also present in the "utils" directory of the Xyce source code, alongside gnuplotXyce.py. If you have the whole utils directory downloaded, this error should go away.
I just tried gnuplotXyce.py on a simple netlist with csv output and it didn't work, so my assumption is that the script was not maintained and will need to be fixed.
The script does sort of work if you use the native Xyce standard (.prn) format (i.e. don't specify "format=csv" on your .print line). Unfortunately, it does not leave the window open after it finishes plotting, so it is rather useless. If you use the "--ps" option, though, a correct postscript file will be created that can be viewed in any postscript viewer, or printed on a postscript printer (or through a properly set-up Linux CUPS printer that understands postscript).
The CSV format in Xyce was primarily created in order to allow import into spreadsheets such as Excel or OpenOffice-scalc, which programs have their own plotting utilities.
The ".prn" standard format works well in gnuplot. There is an example of how to use gnuplot to do this display in the document "Using Open Source Schematic Capture Tools With Xyce" on the Sandia Labs Xyce web site (in the documentation and tutorials section).
The official Xyce web site is http://xyce.sandia.gov/

Trying to automate the fpga build process in Xilinx using python scripts

I want to automate the entire process of creating ngs,bit and mcs files in xilinx and have these files be automatically be associated with certain folders in the svn repository. What I need to know is that is there a log file that gets created in the back end of the Xilinx gui which records all the commands I run e.g open project,load file,synthesize etc.
Also the other part that I have not been able to find is a log file that records the entire process of synthesis, map,place and route and generate programming file. Specially record any errors that the tool encountered during these processes.
If any of you can point me to such files if they exist it would be great. I haven't gotten much out of my search but maybe I didn't look enough.
Thanks!

Well, it is definitely a nice project idea but a good amount of work. There's always a reason why an IDE was built – a simple search yields the "Command Line Tools User Guide" for various versions of Xilinx ISE, like for 14.3, 380 pages about
Overview and list of features
Input and output files
Command line syntax and options
Report and message information
ISE is a GUI for various command line executables, most of them are located in the subfolder 14.5/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin/ (in this case: Linux executables for version 14.5) of your ISE installation root. You can review your current parameters for each action by right clicking the item in the process tree and selecting "Process properties".
On the Python side, consider using the subprocess module:
The subprocess module allows you to spawn new processes, connect to their input/output/error pipes, and obtain their return codes.
Is this the entry point you were looking for?

As phineas said, what you are trying to do is quite an undertaking.
I've been there done that, and there are countless challenges along the way. For example, if you want to move generated files to specific folders, how do you classify these files in order to figure out which files are which? I've created a project called X-MimeTypes that attempts to classify the files, but you then need a tool to parse the EDA mime type database and use that to determine which files are which.
However there is hope, so to answer the two main questions you've pointed out:
To be able to automatically move generated files to predetermined paths. From what you are saying it seems like you want to do this to make the versioning process easier? There is already a tool that does this for you based on "design structures" that you create and that can be shared within a team. The tool is called Scineric Workspace so check it out. It also have built in Git and SVN support which ignores things according to the design structure and in most cases it filters all generated things by vendor tools without you having to worry about it.
You are looking for a log file that shows all commands that were run. As phineas said, you can check out the Command Line Tools User guides for ISE, but be aware that the commands to run have changed again in Vivado. The log file of each process also usually states the exact command with its parameters that have been called. This should be close to the top of the report. If you look for one log file that contains everything, that does not exist. Again, Scineric Workspace supports evoking flows from major vendors (ISE, Vivado, Quartus) and it produces one log file for all processes together while still allowing each process to also create its own log file. Errors, warning etc. are also marked properly in this big report. Scineric has a tcl shell mode as well, so your python tool can run it in the background and parse the complete log file it creates.
If you have more questions on the above, I will be happy to help.
Hope this helps,
Jaco

Convert CVS/SVN to a Programming Snippets Site

I use cvs to maintain all my python snippets, notes, c, c++ code. As the hosting provider provides a public web- server also, I was thinking that I should convert the cvs automatically to a programming snippets website.
cvsweb is not what I mean.
doxygen is for a complete project and to browse the self-referencing codes online.I think doxygen is more like web based ctags.
I tried with rest2web, it is requires that I write /restweb headers and files to be .txt files and it will interfere with the programming language syntax.
An approach I have thought is:
1) run source-hightlight and create .html pages for all the scripts.
2) now write a script to index those script .htmls and create webpage.
3) Create the website of those pages.
before proceeding, I thought I shall discuss here, if the members have any suggestion.
What do do, when you want to maintain your snippets and notes in cvs and also auto generate it into a good website. I like rest2web for converting notes to html.

Run Trac on the server linked to the (svn) repository. The Trac wiki can conveniently refer to files and changesets. You get TODO tickets, too.

enscript or pygmentize (part of pygments) can be used to convert code to HTML. You can use a custom header or footer to link to the actual code for download.

I finally settled for rest2web. I had to do the following.
Use a separate python script to recursively copy the files in the CVS to a separate directory.
Added extra files index.txt and template.txt to all the directories which I wanted to be in the webpage.
The best thing about rest2web is that it supports python scripting within the template.txt, so I just ran a loop of the contents and indexed them in the page.
There is still lot more to go to automate the entire process. For eg. Inline viewing of programs and colorization, which I think can be done with some more trials.
I have the completed website here, It is called uthcode.