Sometimes, it becomes necessary to switch to an earlier version of CUDA in order to run older code on a machine that is actually set up to use the current version of the CUDA toolkit. This is as simple as adjusting the values of a few environment variables, yet it is cumbersome to do manually. Therefore, this repository provides the bash script switch-cuda.sh, which adjusts the environment to use a specific version of CUDA for the current bash session.

Notice: switch-cuda.sh has been written for and tested on Ubuntu 16.04, but is easily adapted for other platforms.

source switch-cuda.sh [VERSION]

Notice that the script has to be sourced rather than executed, as it performs changes of environment variables that are supposed to persist after the script has finished. If a version number is provided, than all relevant environment variables are adjusted to the required CUDA version (including PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, CUDA_HOME, and CUDA_ROOT). If no version is provided, however, then the script simply prints all versions of CUDA that have been found on the used machine (in /usr/local).

$ source switch-cuda.sh 
The following CUDA installations have been found (in '/usr/local'):
* cuda-8.0
* cuda-9.0
* cuda-9.1

$ source switch-cuda.sh 9.0
Switched to CUDA 9.0.