Specifications

Lesson 5: The Command Line Application

The AnyBody Modeling System comes with a command line version included. It is named AnyBodyCon.exe

("Con" for console application), and you will find it in the directory where you install AnyBody. The command

line version is - as the name indicates - a version of the AnyBody Modeling System with the user interface

stripped off. This means that it is executed from a DOS command prompt or - more importantly - by a batch

file or another software application.

As you may suspect from that introduction, the command line version is mostly designed for technical users

wishing to set up their own data processing application by piecing different types of software together.

The console application can either work interactively and accepts commands that you type in response to its

command prompt, or it can take its input from a file containing macro commands. Let us try the interactive

mode. We need a model to work on, so please download and save Demo.outputfile.any

in some working

directory.

Here's a tricky part: AnyBodyCon does currently not have any commands for changing the working directory

after it has been started. Therefore, it must be started in a way so that it can find the model files you intend

to load. You can basically do this in two ways from a DOS prompt:

1. You change directory to wherever you saved Demo.outputfile.any and from here you run the

console program using its full path, e.g. "C:\Program Files\AnyBody

Technology\AnyBody.3.0\AnyBodyCon.exe".

2. You open AnyBody with a /d argument that sets the working directory of console. You can either

change the directory to the place of AnyBodyCon.exe first or you can use the full path from

anywhere, e.g. "C:\Program Files\AnyBody Technology\AnyBody.3.0\AnyBodyCon.exe" /d

"c:\...\My Documents"

Naturally, you can add the path of AnyBodyCon.exe to the path of your DOS command prompt environment,

but be aware that this can cause confusion in case of multiple installations of AnyBody. We shall cover this

issue of using DOS PATH in more details in a separate section later in this lesson.

You are now ready to use the console application. The application is rather primitive. It only