bionic (1) dtfits.1.gz

NAME

       dtfits - display FITS table

SYNOPSIS

       dtfits <table>

DESCRIPTION

       dtfits  dumps  the  contents  of a FITS table in an ASCII format, either into a user-specified file or on
       stdout. The output is formatted on a fixed number of  columns  to  make  it  readable  by  human  beings.
       Additional  informations  are  printed  out before the table values are dumped, these informations can be
       skipped by using the -d option.

       Last, if you want to dump the table into an easily parsable format (for a piece of software),  you  might
       want  to  use  the  -s  option  which  specifies a character to use as separator. All data fields will be
       printed out separated by this character only. This allows to use string parsers to cut  down  the  output
       lines  into  tokens  by looking for this separator. Fields (lines) will still be delimited by the end-of-
       line character. This option produces ASCII tables which are easy to parse for a  piece  of  software  but
       mostly unreadable to human beings.

       Notice that dtfits only accepts one single FITS table in input.

OPTIONS

       -d     Skip  information  output  about the table and column names. Outputs only the table values. Beware
              that if the FITS file contains several  extensions,  they  will  all  appear  one  after  another,
              separated  only  by  two  blank  lines. In that case, it would be preferrable to keep the complete
              output and parse out the returned stream to differentiate which data come from where.

       -s <char>
              Use the character <char> as separator in output. This option is useful if you want  to  produce  a
              table that should be parsed by a piece of software (see above description). The separator can only
              be a single non-null character. To avoid special characters being interpreted by the shell, it  is
              recommended to provide this character always between simple or double quotes. Example:
              dtfits -s '&' table.tfits

       If you want to use a special character as separator, such as a tab, use ^V to insert your character, such
       as:
       dtfits -s '^V<TAB>' table.tfits

       which means: you type CTRL-V and then the tab key.

SEE ALSO

       dfits

FILES

       FITS tables are stored into extensions. If there are several tables in a file, they will all be displayed
       one after another in the same output stream.

                                                   22 Dec 1999                                         dtfits(1)