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Unix Shell Commands
Shell commands can be executed within XSPEC using the tcl exec command. When running interactively, if Tcl cannot find a command that matches that entered on the command line, it will search for a shell command that matches the entered command. If it finds a match, it automatically executes the shell command via exec. Note that this feature is implemented using the tcl unknown procedure, part of which is a script file loaded by tcl at run time, and may be different or not exist on your system. See Section A.7 for more details on how unknown is implemented in XSPEC.
Note that the tcl exec command executes the given command directly, without first passing it on to the shell. Thus no globbing (ie. expansion of wildcards such as *.pha) is performed. If you wish to pass your command through a shell for wildcard expansion, etc, use the syscall command.
If you want to start a subshell from within XSPEC, simple type the command for starting that shell, ie. type
XSPEC>cshin order to start a C-shell. Note that typing
XSPEC>exec cshwill not work properly. Giving the
XSPEC>syscallcommand with no arguments will start a subshell using your current shell (csh, tcsh, bash, sh, etc).