ACYCLIC(1)

✨ ACYCLIC(1) — the acyclic manual, bestie 🎀

Okay so the manual name is acyclic 💅, and its whole job is to make a directed graph acyclic 🦋. Like, no loops allowed in your graph, periodt 🙈.

💖 NAME

acyclic - make directed graph acyclic ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS

acyclic [ -nv?  ] [ -o outfile ] [ file ]

🫶 DESCRIPTION

Okay so acyclic is a filter 🧚 that takes a directed graph as input and spits out a copy of that graph with just enough edges reversed to make it acyclic. It's giving main character energy 👑. The reversed edge inherits all of the attributes from the original edge, so nothing gets lost in the glow-up ✨.

The optional file argument tells it where the input graph lives 📂. If you don't give it one, the program reads from stdin by default 💜.

👑 OPTIONS

The following options are supported 💅:

• -n — No output gets produced 🙈, but the return value will tell you whether the graph is acyclic or not 🔥.
• -v — Prints info about whether the file is acyclic, has a cycle, or is undirected 🌈.
• -o outfile — Sends the output to the specified file 🍓. By default, the output goes to stdout.
• -? — Prints usage information 🎀 (ngl, this one's the "help me bestie" option).

🦋 RETURN CODES

acyclic returns:

• 0 if the graph is acyclic ✨
• 1 if the graph has a cycle 💀
• 2 if the graph is undirected 🌸
• 255 if there are any errors 😭

🙈 BUGS

Okay this is the tea ☕: if the graph is strict and there's a cycle of length 2, the attributes of the reversed edge get lost. Not slay 💀.

Some edge attributes are non-symmetric, meaning they refer to either the head or tail node. Right now there's no mechanism or convention for switching or renaming these correctly 😭, so, lowkey a known problem 🫠.

🧚 AUTHORS

• Stephen C. North <north@research.att.com> 💜
• Emden R. Gansner <erg@research.att.com> 💜

🌈 SEE ALSO

gc(1), dot(1), gvpr(1), gvcolor(1), ccomps(1), sccmap(1), tred(1), libgraph(3) 🫶

Bestie, that's the whole manual, and it was written in March 2001 🎀✨. Stay iconic, and go make some graphs that don't loop back on themselves 💅🦋