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 Section 2.3: The Command Line Up Chapter 2: Running FEBio Section 2.5: The Configuration File 

2.4 The FEBio Prompt

At the FEBio prompt allows users to manipulate the currently active model or further configure FEBio. The FEBio prompt is shown when you start FEBio without any command arguments, or when a run is interrupted either by the user (using ctrl+c) or by reaching a breakpoint. The FEBio prompt will look something like this:
febio>
You can now enter one of the following commands:
break Add a breakpoint, which will stop FEBio at a particular time point or event. A breakpoint can be defined at a particular (simulation) time or at an event. (See section 2.8.3↓ for more details on break points.)
breaks Prints list of current breakpoints.
clear Clear one or all breakpoints.
config Load (or reload) a configuration file.
cont Continue an interrupted run. FEBio will continue the analysis where it left off.
conv force the current time step to converge. This is useful for example when a time step is having difficulty satisfying too tight of convergence criteria. The user can then manually force the convergence of the time step. However, if the convergence difficulties are due to instabilities, forcing a time step to converge could cause the solution to become unstable or even incorrect. Also be aware that even if the solution recovers on later timesteps, the manually converged step might be incorrect.
debug Entering debug will toggle debug mode. Adding on (off) will turn the debug mode on (resp. off). In debug mode, FEBio will store additional information to the log and plot file that could be useful in debugging the run. It is important to note that since FEBio will store all non-converged states to the plot file, this file may become very large in a short number of time steps. See Section 2.8.2↓ for more details on debugging.
fail Stop the current iteration and retry. If the current time step is not converging and if the auto-time stepper is enabled, the fail command will stop the current time step and retry it with a smaller time step size. If the auto-time stepper is not enabled, the fail command will simply exit the application.
help Prints an overview of available commands with a brief description of each command.
load load a plugin file
out Write the current linear system (matrix and right hand side vector) to a file.
plot Write the current state of the model to the plot database. This command is useful when you want to store the non-converged state at the current iteration. Note that this command only stores the state at the current iteration. If you turn on debug mode, all the iterations are stored to the plot file.
plugins Print a list of the plugins that are loaded.
print Print the value of variables. The following variables can be printed.
  • nnz Number of nonzeroes in global stiffness matrix.
    time The simulation time.
    neq Number of equations.
quit Stop the current model, or exit FEBio if no model is running.
restart Toggles the restart flag. When the restart flag is set, FEBio will create a dump file at the end of each converged time step. This dump file can then later be used to restart the analysis from the last converged time step. See Section 2.8.4↓ and Chapter 5↓ for more details on FEBio's restart feature.
run run an FEBio input file. This command takes the same options as you can enter on the command line. For example, to run a file named test.feb from the FEBio prompt, type the following:
run –i test.feb
svg Write the sparse matrix profile to an svg file.
time Print progress time statistics.
unload unload a plugin from FEBio
version Print version information.
You can also bring up the FEBio prompt during a run by pressing ctrl+c [C]  [C]  This feature does not work on some Linux platforms and may abruptly terminate the run.. See Section 2.8.1↓ for more details.
 Section 2.3: The Command Line Up Chapter 2: Running FEBio Section 2.5: The Configuration File