dbupgrade — a program to upgrade BRL-CAD mged geometry databases files to the current version.
dbupgrade operates on the indicated input geometry database input.g, recognizing the version of the BRL-CAD database provided as input and then converting it to the current database version. Output is then saved to the specified output.g file.
Note that this tool will attempt to automatically 'fix' an existing (v4 format) binary database that was transferred from a binary-incompatible platform. However, this process may be imperfect - the best approach (if the original platform on which the file was created is available) is to run dbupgrade on the file before transferring from the originating platform. Once upgraded the output file will be platform-independent regardless of the platform on which the upgrade was done.
Running dbupgrade removes the need to run g2asc(1) and asc2g(1) on a database to move it between computers (historically this was a way to work around the platform-specific nature of v4 files). The latest BRL-CAD geometry database format is platform-independent.
Numerous error conditions are possible, usually due to errors in the geometry database. Descriptive messages are printed on standard error (file descriptor 2).