Command-line Interface¶

The installed gmshparser command provides three read-only views of an ASCII MSH file:

gmshparser <mesh-file> {info,nodes,elements}

Use uv run gmshparser when running inside a uv-managed project.

Mesh summary¶

gmshparser mesh.msh info

The info action prints the same summary as print(mesh) in the Python API.

gmshparser mesh.msh nodes

The first line is the total node count. Each following line contains:

node_id x y z

Example:

6
1 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
2 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000

gmshparser mesh.msh elements

The first line is the total element count. Each following line contains:

element_id element_type node_id...

Example:

2
1 3 1 2 3 4
2 3 2 5 6 3

gmshparser --help
gmshparser --version

Argument errors are reported by Python's argparse command-line parser. File and parsing errors are currently propagated from the Python API.

Save the output:

gmshparser mesh.msh nodes > nodes.txt
gmshparser mesh.msh elements > elements.txt

Skip the count line and print only node coordinates:

gmshparser mesh.msh nodes | tail -n +2 | awk '{print $2, $3, $4}'

Count element types:

gmshparser mesh.msh elements \
  | tail -n +2 \
  | awk '{print $2}' \
  | sort \
  | uniq -c