Category Archives: Bash

OSX Paths, X11 and paths.d

May 2, 2013 10:56 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

If you’re working with a renderer from the command line, you’ll often need the location of that renderer in the path, so you can call it easily (without always needing the full path). On OSX, there is a folder paths.d under /etc, where you can place text files that will contain paths to be appended to $PATH in terminal sessions:

/etc/paths.d/Nuke6.3v8 contents:

/Applications/Nuke6.3v8/Nuke6.3v8.app/Contents/MacOS

This morning I was attempting to add some other versions to the path (7.0v1, 7.0v6) and I was running into some ridiculous errors. When I added another file: 

/etc/paths.d/Nuke7.0v1 contents:

/Applications/Nuke7.0v1/Nuke7.0v1.app/Contents/MacOS
what I got in my path was instead 
/Applications/Nuke7.0v1/Nuke7.0v1.app/Contents/MacOS1/bin

Why? I have no idea. I tried different file names, different text encoding types, etc and was always getting that extra text on the end. I noticed that I had one other file in my paths.d, from the installation of the osx developer tools: 50-X11. When I removed that file, everything worked! However, I want to keep that in my path (not sure what apps might be there), so I renamed it to x11 and now that extra text is gone.

I hope this helps someone else in the same situation. I don’t understand what macintosh is doing half the time, and this is that half.

Posted in: bash, OSX, Technical Direction

Nuke command line, “argument not used”

April 25, 2013 2:10 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Working with my python-based nuke render farm, I’ve been shoring up the code to deal with some unusual instances (single frames, fewer frames than clients, et al). When passing arguments to Nuke for rendering, I used this format: 

Nuke7.0v6 -m 8 -x projectFile.nk -F 250-500

When I need to send multiple frames, or frame ranges, to the same instance, the documentation says you can use multiple instances of the -F argument, like so: 

Nuke7.0v6 -m 8 -x projectFile.nk -F 250-500 -F 550-700

What you’ll get, though, is only the second specified frame range (in this case, 550-700) rendering, and the following output: 

"-F": argument not used

"250-500": argument not used

"-F": argument not used

After discussing with Foundry support, it seems the -F switch will only work if placed before the -x switch, like so: 

Nuke7.0v6 -m 8 -F 250-500 -F 550-700 -x projectFile.nk
Otherwise, Nuke assumes the last number is the legacy method of passing frame ranges to the command line renderer, and ignores your -F switch. I’ve requested that this be specifically mentioned in the documentation.

Posted in: bash, Nuke, Technical Direction