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2.1 Running FEBio on Windows

FEBio is a command line application which means it does not have its own Graphical User Interface (GUI) and must be run from a shell or command line. FEBio runs on several different computing platforms including Windows, Mac OSX, and many versions of Linux. The command line input and output options are described in this chapter.

There are several ways to run FEBio on Windows. The easiest way is by simply selecting the FEBio program from the Programs menu or by double-clicking the FEBio icon in the installation folder. However, this runs FEBio with the installation folder as the working folder, and unless the FEBio input files are in this folder, you will need to know the relative or absolute path to your input files. A more practical approach is to run FEBio from a command prompt. Before you can do this, you need to know two things: how to open a command prompt and how to add the FEBio installation folder to your PATH environment variable so that you can run FEBio from any folder on your system.1

Windows

In order to run FEBio from a command prompt, the path to the FEBio executable must be set in the PATH environment variable. The environment variables, including the PATH variable, are specified in the Environment Variables dialog box. There are a few different ways to get to this dialog box. The easiest way is to write “environment” in the Windows search bar, and select the “Edit the system's environment variables” suggestion. This will open the “System Properties” dialog box. On the Advanced tab, click the Environment variables button. This will open the Environment Variables dialog box. Find the path variable and click the Edit button. On older versions of Windows a semicolon delimited text string appears. At the end of that string (don't delete the current value) type a semi-colon and then the absolute path to the FEBio installation folder (e.g. C:/Program Files/FEBio/bin/). On Windows 10 or newer, the values are displayed in a list. Either click New or double-click on the first empty slot in the list and type the path the febio executable. Then click the OK-button on all open dialog boxes.

To open a command prompt, type cmd in the Windows search and press Enter. A command prompt window should appear. You can now use the cd (change directory) command to navigate to the folder that contains the FEBio input files. To run FEBio, simply type febio4 (with or without additional arguments) and press Enter. Note that if you already had a command prompt open when changing the PATH environment variable, you'll nee to close this window and reopen it after the changes to the environment variables are applied.

Running FEBio from Explorer

A third method of running FEBio, which often is very convenient, is to run FEBio from Windows Explorer. To do this, first open Explorer and browse to the folder that contains your FEBio input files. Next, right-click on the input file and select Open With. Now select Choose default program. A dialog box appears with a list of programs to open the input file. If FEBio is not on this list yet, click the Browse button. Locate the FEBio executable (e.g. in C:/Program Files/FEBio2/bin), select it and press the Open button. Now select FEBio in the Open With dialog box and press Ok.

After you have done this once, the process simplifies. After you right-click the input file, FEBio should now show up in the Open With menu item and can be selected immediately without having to go through all the previous steps.

  1. The current FEBio installers should automatically setup the environment path so that FEBio can be run from anywhere on the file system. ↩