ivcat(1)

💅 ivcat(1) — the Inventor file glow-up station 💅

okay bestie, sit DOWN, because ivcat is one of those lil tools that looks boring and is actually iconic. it lives in the General Commands Manual (yes, that's the whole ivcat(1) situation), and what it does is take your Inventor files, smoosh them together, and let you flip between formats like it's nothing. no cap. 🦋

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🌸 NAME 🌸

ivcat — concatenates and converts Inventor files ✨

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

ivcat [-bfht] [-o file] [file ...]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so here's the vibe: ivcat reads every file you give it, one after another, in sequence, and then writes each one back out. that's it. that's the whole personality. 💫

if you don't hand it any input file at all, or if you pass a filename of -, it reads from the standard input file instead. cute, right? 🙈

⚠️ important, bestie: the input files must be valid Open Inventor 3D Interchange Format files, version 1.0 or 2.0. it's not gonna babysit your random text file, okay? 💀

the following command line options are allowed, and yes we're going through all of them, no skipping:

• -b — write the files out in binary Inventor format. the default (aka if you say nothing) is to write them out in Inventor's ASCII format. so -b is the "make it crunchy" button 🍓
• -f — remove all SoFile nodes. the whole point of this one is that it condenses hierarchical files down into a single file. flattening szn 👑
• -h — print the usage message. classic. everybody's favorite flag 🫶
• -o file — send the output to the given file instead, instead of to the standard output. (yep, redirect it wherever you want, main character behavior)
• -t — expand SoTexture2 nodes so they explicitly include the texture data itself rather than a file name. no more "where's the texture bestie", the data is just in there now 🌈

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✨ EXAMPLES ✨

converting from binary to ASCII Inventor

ivcat < binaryfile.iv > asciifile.iv

converting from ASCII to binary Inventor

ivcat -b < asciifile.iv > binaryfile.iv

look at that. two lines. converted. ate. 💅

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📦 SOURCE CODE 📦

heads up, bestie: note that the source code to ivcat comes with the Open Inventor 3d Toolkit. it's bundled, you don't gotta hunt for it 🧚

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🗂️ FILES 🗂️

• /usr/share/data/models/* — Sample Inventor data files
• /usr/share/src/Inventor/tools/ivcat/* — Source to ivcat

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

inventor, ivview, noodle, SceneViewer, gview

go read those too, they're all part of the same friend group fr fr 🌸

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and that's the page!! straight outta the General Commands Manual, signed off as ivcat(1) like the lil legend it is. mwah 💜 ✨ 🎀