Unix

Using the Host version of FTOOLS will require several bits of information that should be provided by the system administrator that performed the Host installation. To use the Host version of FTOOLS the user must know the path to the operating system specific directory under which the Host executables, parameter files, help files, reference data files, scripts, etc are all located.

NOTE that as of v4.0, the initialization procedure for FTOOLS has completely changed. This is described in the INSTALL file contained within the distribution, but is repeated here.

IF YOU HAVE EVER USED FTOOLS BEFORE, YOU WILL HAVE RUN A "MKFTOOLS" SCRIPT TO GENERATE A ".FTOOLS" FILE. BOTH "MKFTOOLS" AND ".FTOOLS" ARE NO LONGER USED AND WILL THOROUGHLY CONFUSE YOUR ATTEMPTS TO USE FTOOLS V4.0!! YOU SHOULD, AT THE VERY LEAST, REMOVE ANY LINES IN YOUR .LOGIN AND/OR .CSHRC FILE(S) WHICH SOURCE THE OLD .FTOOLS FILE!!

To properly set up to use FTOOLS v4.0 all you have to do is set a FTOOLS environment variable which points to the place where you installed the tools. (ie, the directory which contains bin/, lib/, help/, etc.) For example, if I unpacked the tar file in my home directory (home/miket) on a Solaris 2.4 system (and didn't supply a prefix option at configure time) I would use: setenv FTOOLS /home/miket/ftools/SunOS_5.4_sparc and then source $FTOOLS/finit.csh (if your shell is csh/tcsh) or . $FTOOLS/finit.sh (if your shell is bash/sh) These two lines ("setenv FTOOLS ....." and "source $FTOOLS/finit.csh") can be put in your .login file so that you'll automatically be set up to use FTOOLS whenever you log in. Because this procedure prepends directories to your existing PATH environment variable, it should NOT be done in the .cshrc file, as that is sourced every time a new shell is spawned! Note that when using the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) the default behavior prevents the .login file from being sourced except for when a Terminal Console is started (and not when a plain Terminal is started). See your sysadmin for help or consult the CDE documentation to find out how to get around this behavior.

FTOOLS HELP DESK

If FTOOLS has been useful in your research, please reference this site (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftools) and use the ASCL reference for HEASoft [ascl:1408.004] or the ASCL reference for the original FTOOLs paper [ascl:9912.002]:

Blackburn, J. K. 1995, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 77, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IV, ed. R. A. Shaw, H. E. Payne, and J. J. E. Hayes (San Francisco: ASP), 367.

Web page maintained by: Bryan K. Irby