Command Line Interface

automesh is used primarily as a command line interface (CLI): a single automesh binary with one subcommand per operation — convert, defeature, diff, extract, mesh, metrics, remesh, segment, and smooth. Each subcommand reads one or more input files and writes an output file.

automesh --help

     @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
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     @@@@  @@@@@@@@@@@    automesh: Automatic mesh generation
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      @@    @@    @@      v0.5.1 linux x86_64
      @@    @@    @@      build 667b104 2026-10-22T21:00:24+0000
    @@@@@@@@@@@@  @@@     Chad B. Hovey <chovey@sandia.gov>
    @@@@@@@@@@@  @@@@     Michael R. Buche <mrbuche@sandia.gov>
    @@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@ @
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Usage: automesh [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

Commands:
  convert    Converts between mesh or segmentation file types
  defeature  Defeatures and creates a new segmentation
  diff       Show the difference between two segmentations
  extract    Extracts a specified range of voxels from a segmentation
  mesh       Creates a finite element mesh from a segmentation
  metrics    Quality metrics for an existing finite element mesh
  partition  Partitions a mesh into parts, written as one exo file per part
  remesh     Applies isotropic remeshing to an existing mesh [default mode: uniform]
  segment    Creates a segmentation or voxelized mesh from an existing mesh
  smooth     Applies smoothing to an existing mesh
  help       Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Global options:
      --log <FILE>  Mirror terminal output to a log file
  -q, --quiet       Pass to quiet the terminal output

Global Options

Two options apply to every subcommand: --quiet and --log.

• --quiet (-q) suppresses the terminal output — the banner, and each command's Reading/Meshing/Writing/Done/Total progress lines — while the command still runs normally.

• --log <FILE> mirrors that same terminal output into a file, with the color escape codes stripped so the file is plain text. automesh inserts a local date-time stamp before the file extension, so rerunning a command with the same --log path never overwrites an earlier log:

  automesh --log run.log mesh hex -i octahedron.npy -o octahedron.inp -r 0
  

  Logging to run_2026-07-17T09-30-58-0600.log
  

  The stamp is YYYY-MM-DD (year-month-day), T marking the start of the time-of-day, then HH-MM-SS (hour-minute-second, local time), followed by the local UTC offset -0600 (six hours behind UTC — Mountain Daylight Time, in this example). Hyphens separate the hour, minute, and second instead of the more common : because : is not a legal filename character on Windows.

--quiet and --log are independent, so --quiet --log run.log runs silently on the terminal while still writing the full log file — useful for scripted or batch invocations where only a record of the run is wanted.