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Herschel's observations have revealed a new picture of star formation from molecular clouds whereby stars are embedded and aligned along interstellar filamentary structures. However details from the formation of filamentary structures in molecular clouds, and the star formation within them, are still not very clear. Recent theoretical modelling has revealed that edge-effects of a uniform cylindrical structure leads to star formation at the ends of the filament, which is supported by observational data for some regions. At the same time more observational data shows that the seeds of stars are embedded along a filamentary structure which is nothing like the results from the edge-effects of gravitational collapse.

A number of observations on the properties of molecular clouds have revealed that their shape is more spheroidal in nature. Therefore we use a publicly available SPH code called GANDALF to investigate systematically how spheroidal molecular clouds, with different initial geometry and physical conditions, evolve to linear filamentary or ring-like structures with different position distributions of the formed condensed cores within such environments. Under certain initial physical conditions, gravitational focusing (edge-effects) could occur while in other cases condensed cores are seen embedded within and aligned along a filament or with the centre of a sheet-like structure.