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)