Launching Smoke from a Terminal

Summary

This article describes how to launch Smoke from a terminal in order to monitor the start-up sequence or to set environment variables or start-up parameters.

Warning! Use the start-up parameters and variables in this article with extreme caution. We recommend using these commands only if instructed to do so by an Autodesk Customer Support Specialist in the context of a Support case. Improper use of start-up parameters or environment variables may result in project data or media loss.

Procedure

Perform the following tasks to launch the application from the terminal and set environment variables if needed:

1. Open the Terminal from the Applications > Utilities folder.
    
2. Set environment variables, as needed, using the following syntax:
   export <Variable name>=<variable value>
   
   Note: see the following section for a list of useful variables.
    
3. Navigate into the application folder. For instance:
   cd /usr/discreet/smoke_2013.1
    
4. Launch the application using the following command:
   ./startApplication
   
   Note: You can also add one or more start-up parameters after the ./startApplication command. Type ./startApplication -? to get the complete list of start-up parameters.
5. This will launch the application in verbose mode in the terminal window.

Useful environment variables

The following table lists some of the most useful environment variables you can use with Smoke.