When dealing with binary ANSYS files — whether received from a colleague or examining archived models — one may wish to find out which version of ANSYS was last used when saving the file.

BVI is a package that includes the bmore command, which can list binary data contents. It is not included on most Linux distributions by default, but it is usually available in the software repositories, so installation should be a breeze with Linux package managers.

A sample output from bmore file.db is shown below:

00000000  00 00 00 64 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 FF FF FF FF ...d............
00000010  00 01 E2 36 01 32 8F 67 FF FF FF FF 00 00 00 00 ...6.2.g........
00000020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 31 32 2E 30 ............12.0
00000030  01 32 8E 2F 57 49 4E 44 4F 57 53 20 78 36 34 20 .2./WINDOWS x64
00000040  66 69 6C 65 20 20 20 20 46 55 4C 4C 20 20 20 20 file    FULL
00000050  2E 31 20 20 75 73 65 72 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 .1  user
00000060  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 ..............@.
00000070  00 0A 7A 82 00 00 00 26 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 ..z....&........
00000080  66 69 6C 65 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 file
00000090  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
000000A0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 56 4D 32 35 35 2C 44 45 ........VM255,DE
000000B0  4C 41 4D 49 4E 41 54 49 4F 4E 20 4F 46 20 44 4F LAMINATION OF DO
000000C0  55 42 4C 45 20 43 41 4E 54 49 4C 45 56 45 52 20 UBLE CANTILEVER
000000D0  42 45 41 4D 20 55 53 49 4E 47 20 44 45 42 4F 4E BEAM USING DEBON
000000E0  44 49 4E 47 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 DING
000000F0  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

The most useful information is the ANSYS version number (line 3, “12.0”, and line 6, “.1” to refer to “12.0.1”) that appears.  The operating system (“Windows x64” in this case) that was used is also saved with the database, along with the user name (in this example, simply changed to “user”).

The title (if present via the /TITLE command) is also listed at the end.  Few users take advantage of subtitles (/STITLE command), but any subtitles will also be present in the header.

If a user may wish to use a more readable output, one can actually use ANSYS to print header information, regardless of the version of the binary database. Do not RESUME the database, but simply use the following commands:

  1. /aux2
  2. fileaux2,file,db
  3. dump

This will enter the binary file dump processor (/AUX2). The file “file.db” is specified, and its contents are printed out. The verbosity of output can be controlled with the FORM command. The output for the same 12.0.1 binary file is listed below using ANSYS 11.0:

DUMP OF FILE= file.db
 RECORDS       1 TO       1

 RECORD=       1   LENGTH=     100   LOC=           0   KBF=     100      (HEADER RECORD)
 SOURCE:  ANSYS PROGRAM
 UNIT:  16      FILE FORMAT: External
 RECORD LENGTH:    16384      FILE SIZE:       686722     SPLIT POINT:     524288
 NUMBER OF PROCESSORS:   2
 CREATION TIME: 12:34:46
 CREATION DATE: 07/27/2009
 RELEASE: 12.0.1    UPDATE: 20090415

 SYSTEM:        WINDOWS x64
 PRODUCT NAME:  FULL
 JOBNAME(1:8):  file
 JOBNAME(1:32): file
 USER:          user        

 TITLE: VM255,DELAMINATION OF DOUBLE CANTILEVER BEAM USING DEBONDING
 SUBTITLE:                                                                     

 UNITS: UNDEFINED

One can see that this output is much more readable than looking through the binary file directly with the bmore command.

The above discussion not only applies to the ANSYS database .db file, but it can also be used for most binary files, such as the .rst result file, .emat element matrix file, etc.