acyclic

Make a directed graph acyclic by reversing some edges

$ acyclic [path/to/input.gv] > [path/to/output.gv]

$ acyclic -v -n [path/to/input.gv]

$ acyclic -?

Synopsis: Not applicable. There is no standard 'acyclic' command.

The command 'acyclic' is not a standard or commonly recognized utility within the Linux operating system. It is highly probable that this is a typo, a custom script, or a reference to a specific tool not part of the core GNU/Linux distribution. Standard Linux environments do not ship with a command explicitly named 'acyclic' that performs a dedicated function related to acyclicity, such as detecting cycles in graphs or file systems via a single command.

While the concept of 'acyclic' is fundamental in computing (e.g., Directed Acyclic Graphs or DAGs in dependency management, or the tree-like structure of file systems), its operations are typically handled by more specialized tools or programming constructs. For instance, visualizing DAGs might involve Graphviz's dot command, and ensuring file system integrity (which implies acyclicity) is handled by tools like fsck.

This 'acyclic' command does not exist as a standard part of Linux distributions. Any references to it might be specific to a niche software package, a typo, or a custom user-defined alias/script. Attempting to execute 'acyclic' on a typical Linux system will result in a 'command not found' error.

While there's no direct 'acyclic' command, the concept of acyclicity is crucial in several Linux contexts:
File Systems: The directory structure of a Unix/Linux file system is fundamentally an acyclic tree (a type of DAG). Although symbolic links can create traversal loops, they do not create true cycles in the underlying directory structure itself. Hard links can create cycles in inode references but typically not in the directory hierarchy.
Dependency Management: Build systems (like make), package managers (like apt or dnf), and software pipelines often rely on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to manage dependencies, ensuring that tasks are executed in the correct order without circular dependencies that would lead to infinite loops.
Graph Visualization: Tools like Graphviz (especially the dot command) are used to visualize graphs, often with the intent of creating clean, acyclic layouts for representing dependencies or relationships.

dot(1), find(1), fsck(8)