Common Package Specification (CPS) officially supported. This provides a solution for the long-standing program of build system-agnostic JSON package configuration files, which can be generated by CMake’s install(EXPORT) and consumable by other build systems.
cmake --version=json-v1 tells details of the libraries vendored into CMake, which is useful for debugging and reporting issues with CMake’s bundled dependencies. This is complementary to cmake -E capabilities which reports specific capabilities of the CMake.
CMake command line and archive create commands can specify compression level and algorithm in more detail
FASTBuild
generator has impressive
benchmarks.
FASTBuild supports more modern platforms including Windows, versus
ccache
or distcc.
ExternalProject
added options to modify environment variables at each step by CONFIGURE_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION, BUILD_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION, INSTALL_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION, TEST_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION
CMake warns if cmake_minimum_required() is
< 3.10.
TLS ≥ 1.2 is required by default for internet operations e.g. file(DOWNLOAD), ExternalProject, FetchContent, and similar.
file(ARCHIVE_CREATE)
gained a long-needed WORKING_DIRECTORY parameter that is essentially necessary to avoid machine-specific paths being embedded in the archive.
cmake_language(EXIT code)
to exit CMake script mode with a specific return code.
This is useful when using CMake as a platform-agnostic scripting language instead of shell script.
Environment variable
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
is used to set the default install prefix across projects–it can be overridden as typical by cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX= option.
Target property
TEST_LAUNCHER
allows specifying a test launcher.
For MPI program this allows deduplicating or making more programmatic test runner scripts.
Linker information variables including
CMAKE__COMPILER_LINKER_ID
have been added to allow programmatic logic like setting target_link_options() based on the particular linker.
changes PATH behavior for
Windows find_{library,path,file}()
to no longer search PATH.
This may break some projects that rely on PATH for finding libraries.
MSYS2-distributed CMake is patched to include PATH like earlier CMake, which can be confusing for CI etc. not using MSYS CMake with that patch.
Windows CI/user may need to specify CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH like
The Matlab version can be obtained “brute force” by running Matlab, but this can take tens of seconds on a network drive system such as HPC.
matlab -batch "disp(version)"
A much faster way to get the Matlab version is to read the VersionInfo.xml file that is included in the Matlab installation directory. This file contains the version information in XML format, as is available at least back to Matlab R2016a.
This
Python script
quickly parses the VersionInfo.xml file to extract the Matlab version information without needing to run Matlab itself.
Environment variables that start with DYLD_ are
restricted by macOS,
and are not passed to child processes by default for security reasons.
A workaround for this is to use a dummy environment variable that does not start with DYLD_, and then use a wrapper script to read that variable and set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable accordingly.
This is necessary because DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH is read at program startup, and setting it within a program will not have any effect on the dynamic linker used by that program.
The wrapper script can be used to set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable before executing the desired program, allowing it to find the necessary libraries without being blocked by macOS security restrictions.
Continuous integration (CI) systems generally rely on an integer return code to detect success (== 0) or failure (!= 0).
The
error()
and
assert()
functions of Matlab / GNU Octave return non-zero status that works well with CI systems.
The Matlab
unittest framework
is the primary method for testing Matlab code.
Matlab -batch option to run from the command line completely replaces -r and is more robust.
matlab -batch "assertSuccess(runtests)"
For pre-buildtool releases of matlab (< R2022b) we use a helper
script
that invokes
runtests
with appropriate parameters for the Matlab release used.
To test across Matlab releases without a specific CI Matlab version fanout, we can use Python Pytest as in this
wrapper script
that tests Matlab from R2017a to R2025b and beyond.
There are several ways to reboot a computer from the terminal.
For
Linux
or
macOS
the “reboot” command (or shutdown -r) is commonly used.
For Windows, the PowerShell command
Restart-Computer
is a standard way to reboot the system from Terminal.
Within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), the “reboot” command is only for the particular WSL instance and actually results in a shutdown of the WSL instance, not the entire Windows system.
One can verify this by before and after the standard 8 second WSL shutdown time, running in Windows Terminal:
The Anytone AT-5000 radio has three modes: Ham, HF, and CB.
99 memories are available in each of Ham mode and HF mode.
16 memories are available in CB mode (even after moving the jumper that enables Ham and HF modes).
MEM channels are not shared between frequency modes, so there are 99 Ham and 99 HF channels and 16 CB MEM channels.
The radio cover screws are T9 Torx.
Anytone AT-5000 quirks:
“Dual watch” does not work in VFO mode, even from MEM channels. VFO is only available in Ham or HF profiles, and is how one would normally use the radio in HF or Ham mode.
If a MEM channel is deleted from the scan list, it’s still scanned when scanning MEM channels. This seems like a firmware bug, present in a radio with LCD version 1.00, RF version 1.00, and radio data version 1.00. The “workaround” is to delete the channel from MEM, which is not so desirable but the only way we know how at this time.
Anytone (Qixiang Electronics) provides a programming cable for the Anytone AT-5000 radio, which connects via the 8P8C modular microphone jack to USB.
This is a USB to serial adapter.
If the comm port does not appear in the
AT-5000 CPS software
or in Device Manager under “Ports (COM & LPT)” as “USB-SERIAL CH340 (COMx)”,
check Windows Device Manager under “Other devices” for “USB Serial” with a yellow warning icon.
The driver necessary is the GD USB Virtual Comm Port driver, which can be downloaded as part of the Anytone D878 programming software package if not seen as part of the Anytone AT-5000 CPS install package.
Don’t install the D878 CPS software, just extract the Zip archive folder titled like “Virtual GD USB Com Drivers (Only If Needed)” and extract the “GD_VirtualComDriver v2.0.2.4944.rar” file to get the driver installer under the “x64” folder.
After installing the driver, unplug and replug the programming cable.
If it’s still showing a yellow warning icon, right-click on the “USB Serial” entry, select “Update driver”, and choose to browse for drivers on the computer by “let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer”.
Under USB Devices look for “USB-SERIAL CH340” and select it to install the driver.
It might be necessary to unplug and replug the programming cable again after installing the driver for it to be recognized properly.
There should no longer be a yellow warning icon, and the comm port should appear in the AT-5000 CPS software as “USB-SERIAL CH340 (COMx)” under the “Port” dropdown menu.
These bugs were present in the first release of the AT-5000 CPS software.
Can’t add or edit memory channels: set the band and working band near the top of the Channel editing window to MEM. Each time a channel is edited, this may need to be done again
Can’t delete memory channels: channels appear to be deleted, but appear again upon programming the radio. Simply delete them from the radio front panel instead
For CMake, the export of compile commands comes by setting the CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS variable to ON.
This generates <build_dir>/compile_commands.json file that contains the compile commands for each source file.
However, this does not include the link commands used to link the final executable or library.
To show the link commands in Ninja for a specific target, use:
ninja -t compdb-targets mytarg
This command has to be issued directly to Ninja, not using “cmake –build”.
Matlab preferences are stored in <prefdir>/matlab.mlsettings since Matlab R2020a.
To reset Matlab preferences, one can rename / move this file–keep it for a backup.
The location of <prefdir> can be found by running the following command in Matlab:
prefdir
After moving the matlab.mlsettings file, restart Matlab.
Matlab will create a new matlab.mlsettings file with default preferences.
This is particularly helpful if Python is setup with a “bad” distribution that crashes Matlab upon Python py. commands in Matlab, and there isn’t another Python distribution available to switch to in Matlab’s preferences.
The matlab.mlsettings file is a ZIP file of XML and JSON files and folders.
These one-line Unix-like shell commands help find the directories consuming the most hard drive space.
This command lists the top 10 largest directories in the specified path.
This is useful to HPC where disk quota as seen by quota -s or similar indicates it’s time to clean up some files.
du -hd1 /path/to/check 2>/dev/null | sort -rh | head
While disk size quota is often the main concern, there is often also a quota on the number of files (inodes) that can be owned by a user.
To find the directories with the most files, use this command:
find /path/to/check -type f -printf '%h\n' 2>/dev/null | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
Graphical terminal disk usage program “ncdu” is a widely-available Ncurses based program showing the largest files.
NCDU is more user-friendly than the plain text method above.
NCDU allows deleting files interactively.
When using on WSL, specify the desired drive like (for C: in this example):
When using CMake’s add_custom_command and add_custom_target on Windows, if the CMAKE_EXECUTABLE_SUFFIX (which is typically .exe) is not included as part of the command or target, it can lead to the custom target is rebuilt every time the project is rebuilt, even if the command is up to date.
This happens because CMake does not exactly match the output file of the custom command, since the .exe suffix was missing on Windows, and therefore CMake does not properly track the existence of a target’s dependencies.
As a result, CMake assumes that the target is always out of date and needs to be rebuilt.
To avoid this issue, ensure that the output of your custom command includes the CMAKE_EXECUTABLE_SUFFIX.
For example, if generating an executable with add_custom_command, specify the output file with the correct suffix:
By including the CMAKE_EXECUTABLE_SUFFIX in both the OUTPUT and DEPENDS sections, CMake will correctly recognize the target as an executable and will only rebuild it when necessary, thus avoiding unnecessary rebuilds.