NMRPipe is a UNIX-based collection of programs and scripts for manipulating multidimensional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data. NMRPipe has its genesis as a spectral processing engine, and over the years has been augmented with a variety of facilities for spectral analysis and quantification, extraction of structural information from NMR data, and manipulation of molecular structures. The use of NMRPipe is noted in roughly 40% of all NMR structures accepted into the Protein Data Bank (PDB).

NMRPipe scripts are generally UNIX C-shell scripts, or TCL scripts which use NMRPipe's customized interpreter nmrWish . Some of NMRPipe's programs and scripts have interactive graphical interfaces, including NMRPipe's primary program for viewing spectra nmrDraw , scroll.tcl for viewing strips from one or more 3D spectra, and specView.tcl for viewing 1D and 2D spectral series. Many NMRPipe programs are operated from the UNIX command line, and some, such as the nmrPipe program itself, are almost always used from inside a shell script. The nmrWish script interpreter includes the standard features of TCL, TK, and BLT, as well as many other NMR-related functions that have been added.

Most of NMRPipe's programs and scripts have command-line options, which you can list by using the -help option. For example, typing nmrPipe -help will list the general command line arguments for nmrPipe . Typing nmrPipe -help -fn ZF will display information about NMRPipe's Zero Fill function ZF .