Simics's Search Path

15.4 Simics's Search Path

Many Simics commands will look up files based on the current directory. This may be impractical when writing scripts or building new configurations, so Simics provides two features to ease directory handling:

Simics recognizes some special path markers that are translated before being used:
%simics%
Translated to the current Simics installation directory, so that %simics%/scripts/foo.simics will be translated to, for example, /home/joe/simics/scripts/foo.simics. Note that if you change the version of Simics you are using, %simics% will change as well, so you should use it to refer only to files that you know are present in all Simics versions.
.
%script%
Translated to the directory where the currently running script is located. A possible usage is to let a script call another one in the same directory, independently of what the current directory is.
For example, if the directory /home/joe/scripts/ contains the scripts foo.simics and bar.simics, even if the user uses Simics with /home/joe/workspace/ as current directory, it will be possible for foo.simics to call bar.simics by issuing the command:
```
run-command-file %script%/bar.simics
```
%simics% and %script% are always translated to absolute paths, so they never interact with the next feature, called Simics's search path.

Simics has a list of paths called Simics's search path where files will be looked up when using some specific commands (among others, load-binary, load-file, run-command-file, and run-python-file). The file is first looked up in the current directory, then in all entries of Simics's search path, in order.
Let us assume for example that Simics's search path contains
/home/joe/scripts/ and that the current directory is /home/joe/workspace. If the command:
```
simics> run-command-file test/start-test.simics
```
is issued, Simics will look for the following files to run:
1. /home/joe/workspace/test/start-test.simics
2. /home/joe/scripts/test/start-test.simics

Simics's search path can be manipulated using the add-directory, clear-directories and list-directories commands. Simics's search path is also used when looking for images files belonging to checkpoints or new configuration. This is described in section Image Search Path.

Note: Although the Simics search path is saved in the sim object in checkpoints, allowing image files that were found through it to be opened again by the checkpoint, it is not available until the object creation phase. Module initialization code should not rely on the Simics path since that code is run before the simobject object from the checkpoint has been created.

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