All the interfaces given in Table 1.4 follow the same pattern. If the SIF problem has not yet been decoded, the interface first calls the SIF decoder by means of the sifdecode script. Please pay attention to the fact that, as mentioned in § 1.8, the SIF decoder is now distributed as a separate package and must be installed prior to using any of the CUTEr interfaces. The main executable for the decoder must be found in $MYSIFDEC/precision/bin/sifdec, where $MYSIFDEC is an environment variable pointing to the current instance of SifDec. Failing to do so will result in an abort.
Once the problem has been decoded, the interface calls a common script called runpackage which links the relocatables together, creates an executable file and finally executes it. It may be useful in some cases to decode a SIF-encoded problem without running an optimization package afterwards, or to simply check the syntax of the SIF file. In that respect, the sifdecode script may be called independently, from the command line. Its syntax is similar to that of the interfaces:
| sifdecode | [-s] [-h] [-k] [-o j] [-l secs] [-f] [-b] [-a j] [-show] |
| [-param name=value[,name=value...]] [-force] [-debug] probname[.SIF] |
Note that some of the command-line options only make sense when an optimization package is called after the problem has been decoded. For more information on sifdecode, we refer the reader to the documentation of SifDec, [3].