B.4 Command line commands

Some of the commands in Xselect are really a function of the command line interpreter rather than of Xselect proper. These are generally commands that give information about the parameters used by Xselect, or do logging of sessions, history recall, etc.

Perhaps the most useful command of the lot is the LPARM command. LPARM Lists the PARameters that a given Xselect command will take, shows whether each is queried (with its position on the command line) or hidden, gives its type and current value, and shows its prompt.

The following are the command line commands:

recall - List and re-execute previous commands
alias - Alias complex commands to one word abbreviations
script - Open and close script files
log - Open and close log files
history - Toggles on and off the recording of commands for recall
chatter - Set the terminal and log file chattiness levels
lparm - lists the parameters for a given command
? - lists the commands available (?? does the same)
debug - toggle echoing of each command as it is parsed
dumpcmd - dumps the current copy of the command table
dumpkey - dumps the current copy of the key table
dumppar - dumps the current (in memory) copy of the parameter file

The last four of these are really only for debugging.

Along similar lines, but actually a part of Xselect, is that for most commands with known range of choices (set device, set instrument, and all the commands of the verb verb_what form), if you wait to be prompted (by hitting a return after the command name), you will be given a list of possible responses, and then prompted for your choice, e.g.:

xsel >  extract<ret>

ALL             -->	extract a spectrum, image and light curve
CURVE           --> 	extract a light curve
EVENTS          --> 	output the filtered event list
IMAGE           --> 	extract an image
SPECTRUM        --> 	extract a spectrum
QUIT            --> 	quit extract

> Give parameter to be binned >[all]

In the rest of the section we describe the command line commands one by one.

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