This package provides a C++ interface class to the VMD molfile plugins, http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/plugins/molfile, and a set of LAMMPS classes that use this interface.

Molfile plugins provide a consistent programming interface to read and write file formats commonly used in molecular simulations. This package only provides the interface code, not the plugins; these can be taken as precompiled binaries directly from a VMD installation that matches the platform of your LAMMPS executable. Using the plugin interface one can add support for additional file formats to LAMMPS simply by telling LAMMPS where to find a suitable plugin without having to recompile or change LAMMPS directly. The plugins bundled with VMD are usually installed in a directory inside the VMD installation tree named "plugins/<VMDARCH>/molfile".

To be able to dynamically load and execute the plugins from inside LAMMPS, you need to link with a system library containing functions like dlopen(), dlsym() and so on for dynamic linking of executable code into an executable. This library is defined by setting the molfile_SYSLIB variable in USER-MOLFILE/Makefile.lammps. For Linux and most current unix-like operating systems, this can be kept at the default setting of "-ldl" (on some platforms this library is called "-ldld"). For compilation on Windows, a slightly different mechanism is used that is part of the Windows programming environment and this library is not needed.

The person who created this package is Axel Kohlmeyer at Temple U (akohlmey at gmail.com). Contact him directly if you have questions.