Magic-7.3 Command Reference

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## help

Print out synopses for all commands valid in the current window (or restrict output to those containing the indicated pattern)

### Usage:

> help [pattern]

> > where pattern is any keyword or text string.

### Summary:

> The help command invokes the built-in help function in magic, which lists the summary usage information that has been compiled into magic for each command. The summary help information is usually only a single line of text. Commands that have complicated sets of options have their own help option, which is not part of the help command.

> Without arguments, help reports a summary usage for every command in magic. With arguments, magic filters the output to report only those commands matching the indicated text pattern.

> The output is divided into general-purpose and window-specific sections. The window-specfic section depends on the active window. For instance, with a single layout window present, help cleanup returns no information. However, the command specialopen netlist followed by help cleanup will report the usage of the command cleanup, which is a command that can only be invoked from the netlist window.

### Implementation Notes:

> help is implemented as a built-in command in magic. Note that there is no general-purpose command-line-based help method for Tcl commands, so the help command will not provide any information about magic commands written as Tcl procedures, such as openwrapper or pushstack. The general convention is for each Tcl procedure to allow the option help and provide its own usage information.

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Last updated: October 6, 2004 at 7:02pm