bms(1)

NAME

bms - Batch MandelSpawn, a network Mandelbrot program.

SYNOPSIS

bms [ -options ] ...

DESCRIPTION

Bms is a program for making pictures of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. It is a batch-mode version of the interactive, X-based xms program (see xms(1)) for full information).

Bms writes the picture on its standard output in Portable Greymap (pgm) or Portable Pixmap (ppm) format. In the former case, the iteration counts are used directly as greyscale pixel values, so the interior of the Mandelbrot set will appear white, not black. The picture can be further manipulated using the tools from Jef Poskanzer's PBMPLUS image processing and conversion package. A typical example is the pipeline

bms -iterations 256 -width 600 -height 400 |

pnminvert |

pgmtops -rle |

lpr -Pps

which can be used to print a black-on-white Mandelbrot image on a PostScript printer.

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS

Bms supports the following command line options:

-iterations n: Specifies the maximum number of iterations. The default is 250.

-colour: Generate colour (.ppm) output instead of the default of black-and-white (.pgm) output.

-colours n: Specifies the number of colours, as in xms(1). Use together with the -colour option.

-spectrum colour-colour- ... -colour: Specifies the colours to use, as in xms(1). Use together with the -colour option.

-x, -y, -range: Specify the center coordinates and horizontal width, respectively, of the part of the Mandelbrot or Julia set to be calculated.

-julia: Calculate a Julia set instead of the Mandelbrot set. The "-cx" and "-cy" options may be used to choose the c parameter for the Julia set.

-verbose: Print a period on standard error for each reply received from a computation server.

-statistics: Print performance statistics on standard error after finishing the calculations.

-ascii: Force ASCII format for the output file.

BUGS

Bms normally generates binary pgm output, but when the iteration count exceeds 256 it reverts to the ASCII version of the file format. This causes a large increase in file size and an even larger increase in CPU usage.

FILES

/usr/local/etc/mslaves list of computation server hosts
$HOME/.mslaves per-user override of the above