User Environment

Home Directories, Shells and Modules

Home directories ($HOME) are accessible from any of the computers belonging to the department of Mathematics. An environment variable called $HOME is defined and contains the absolute path of a user home directory: use this environment variable whenever possible.

The default shell at the Department of Mathematics is bash.

Using Modules to Manage Access to Software

Users should not have to modify their path directly.  Instead, the module utility is used to set environment variables for software and libraries, including a lot of software that is loaded by default.  Simply ``load'' and ``unload'' modules to control your environment. 

Modules environment management package provides support for dynamic modification of the user environment via modulefiles. Each modulefile contains all the information needed to configure the shell for a particular application. Typically, a modulefile modifies environment variables like PATH, MANPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and XXXX_HOME (where XXX is the name of a software/library in capital letter) to give access to an application or library. 

What is loaded now?

[europa ~]$  module list

Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
  1) matinst   2) use.own

What is available?

To see which modulefiles are available on your system, enter this command:

[europa ~]$  module avail [string]

The module avail command produces an alphabetical listing of every modulefile in your module use path and has no option for "grepping." Therefore, it is usually more useful to use the command with an string argument:

[europa ~]$  module avail python

----------------------------------------------------------------- /opt/uio/modules/software ------------------------------------------------------------------
python/anaconda(default) python/canopy

Loading and Unloading Modules

If a modulefile is not already loaded, use the module load command to load:

[europa ~]$  module load netcdf

This command loads the currently defined default version of the module, unless you specify otherwise:

[europa ~]$  module load netcdf/4.2.0_intel

This will load the netcdf library compiled with intel compilers.

If you want to remove a software/library from your user environment you may unload it:

europa ~]$  module unload netcdf/4.2.0_intel

You need to unload the same version you previously loaded.

Module Swapping

Alternatively, you can use the module swap or module switch command to unload one module and load the comparable module:

europa ~]$  module load netcdf

europa ~]$  module list

Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
  1) matinst        2) use.own            3) netcdf/4.2.0_gnu

europa ~]$  module switch netcdf netcdf/4.2.0_intel

europa ~]$  module list

Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
  1) matinst        2) use.own            3) netcdf/4.2.0_intel

Adding your our modulefile

Create a directory called privatemodules in your home directory. Then type the command:

module load use.own

and any personal module files in this directory will become available for you to list, load or unload. As previously explained, you can add it to ~/.modulerc to load it automatically at login.

For more information see Modules Software Environment.