[Magic-dev] spice2sim man page

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Aanjhan,

> I am finding that spice2sim is also a binary package that comes in
> along with magic src tarball. But I am unable to find a corresponding
> manpage for it. Is there one?  Debian based distros do not accept
> binaries without manpages as a matter of good practice.
> 
> Or can I get the Usage guide of spice2sim from some link so that I can
> write a manpage and contribute back? I googled but couldnt find much
> info. I am not sure if I missed something here.

Technically, spice2sim is a script (awk script), not a binary.  The
summary usage is really just what's printed on the first comment line,
which is:

    "convert an ext2spice produced file to a .sim file for debugging"

It looks like it takes no arguments, and expects input from stdin and
writes output to stdout.  Typical usage would be:

    spice2sim < circuit.spice > circuit.sim

However, please note that (1) this file is outdated with respect to
bipolar transistors as well as semiconductor resistors and capacitors
that Magic and IRSIM can handle, and (2) since from Magic you can
get either format for output, converting between the two is generally
unnecessary, and (3) if you have a Magic-derived SPICE file without
a layout, "netgen" will better handle the conversion.  In other
words, if you leave "spice2sim" out of the Debian distro, nobody
will care, and probably nobody will even notice.

					---Tim

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