Mechanical APDL Basic Analysis Guide

20.4. Text Versus Binary Files

Depending on how files are used, the program writes them in text (ASCII) form or binary form. For ex-
ample,ERR and LOG files are text, while DB,EMAT, and RST files are binary. In general, files that you
may need to read (and edit) are written in text form, and all other files are written in binary form.

All binary files are external type files.External binary files are transportable between different computer
systems.

Below are some tips for using binary files:

• When transferring files via FTP (File Transfer Protocol), you must set the BINARY option before doing
  the transfer.


• Most ANSYS binary files must have write permission to be used, even if the data is only being read
  from the file. However, the database files (file.DB) and results files (file.RST,file.RTH, etc.)
  can be read-only. When you save a read-only file.DB, the existing read-only file is saved to a
  file.DBB. However, you cannot save the read-only file.DB a second time, because it will attempt
  to write over the file.DBB, which ANSYS will not allow.

Warning

Binary files are not backward-compatible with previous releases of the ANSYS program. For

example, you cannot use binary files produced by ANSYS 15.0 with release ANSYS 5.7 or

earlier. Attempting to use binary files from later releases with an earlier release can cause

serious operating problems in ANSYS. For a list of the files that are upwardly compatible,

see Table 20.2: Permanent Files Written by the ANSYS Program (p. 320).

20.4.1. ANSYS Binary Files over NFS.

You can access ANSYS binary files (for example,file.LN22,file.DB,file.RST) from NFS-mounted
disk partitions. However, this usage is discouraged because heavy network traffic may result. Also, network
traffic may cause NFS errors, which in turn can cause the ANSYS program to read or write an ANSYS
binary file incorrectly.

20.4.2. Files that ANSYS Writes

The following tables list the files that ANSYS writes.

Table 20.1: Temporary Files Written by the ANSYS Program

Identifi- Type Contents

er

ANO Text Graphics annotation commands [/ANNOT]

BAT Text Input data copied from batch input file [/BATCH]

DOn Text Do-loop commands for nesting level n

DSCR Binary Scratch file (ANTYPE=2, Modal Analysis)

DSPxx Binary Scratch files for the distributed sparse solver

EROT Binary Rotated element matrices

EVC Binary Scratch file for PCG Lanczos eigensolver

Release 15.0 - © SAS IP, Inc. All rights reserved. - Contains proprietary and confidential information

Text Versus Binary Files