NAME

       einfo - look up general NCBI Entrez database information

SYNOPSIS

       einfo (edirect -info) [-help] [-dbs] [-db name] [-fields] [-links]

DESCRIPTION

       einfo  looks  up  general information about either an individual NCBI Entrez database with
       which other edirect(1) commands can work or the set of available databases as a whole.

       It has two implementations: a shell implementation on top of nquire(1) and  a  traditional
       Perl  implementation  that  amounts  to  running  edirect  -info,  enabled  by setting the
       environment variable USE_NEW_EDIRECT to a false value  as  described  in  the  ENVIRONMENT
       section.

       einfo  is also the name of an tool for accessing contents of local EPUB files.  To resolve
       this ambiguity, Debian systems with  both  EPUB  utilities  and  Entrez  Direct  installed
       arrange for the EPUB-related executable to have the name einfo.epub(1) and for einfo to be
       a wrapper script that examines its usage and proceeds to run whichever of edirect -info or
       einfo.epub(1) looks like a better fit.

OPTIONS

   Database Selection
       -dbs   Print a plain-text list of all available Entrez databases.

       -db name
              Print  information on the specified Entrez database (or all), as an XML eInfoResult
              document.

   Data Summaries
       -fields
              Print just an XML-structured summary of fields in the specified database.

       -links Print just an XML-structured summary of links to and from the specified database.

   Miscellaneous
       -help  Print usage information, complete with samples of -fields and -links XML output.

ENVIRONMENT

       USE_NEW_EDIRECT
              Whether to use the current shell implementation or revert to  the  historical  Perl
              implementation.    Canonical   true  values  are  1,  on  (case-insensitive),  true
              (case-insensitive), and yes (case-insensitive); canonical false values are  0,  off
              (case-insensitive), false (case-insensitive), and no (case-insensitive).

SEE ALSO

       edirect(1), einfo.epub(1), elink(1), nquire(1).