Getting trace information from APALL noninteractively

Frank Valdes wrote on Jul 16, 1999

Q:  I was wondering if it is possible to run apall in a NON-interactive
mode and have it dump the results of the :xyshow command to a file?
In other words, what I need is to produce a text-file of the (X,Y) centroids 
along the spectrum.  This really needs to be done non interactively, 
as there are more than 800 images I have to deal with for this problem.

Any help would be appreciated.


A:  There is a way to do this.  It is based on some hidden tasks and not
something users would normally need.  I won't explain all that is going
on but give you a recipe.

Load the noao.imred.specred package.  There is a hidden task APSCRIPT
used in the various scripts.  DON'T ATTEMPT TO EPAR THIS TASK because
it has so many parameters it can crash epar.  You can use LPAR if
you want to see the parameters.  The thing to know is that
the processing parameters, such as the tracing parameters, are redirected
to the PARAMS parameter set.  So set the PARAMS parameters as you need
for your tracing.

Define your apertures, say with APFIND.  Do the following sequence
of commands (which might be in a script):

apscript.anstrace="YES"
apscript.ansfittrace="YES"
apscript.ansfittrace1="YES"
cl.gcur="cursor.dat"
apscript test >G dev$null
cl.gcur=""

The lines with "YES" force queries to be turned off.  The gcur resets
the cursor input to a file; cursor.dat in this case.  The file contains
the line

:xyshow trace.dat

Then APSCRIPT is run with the graphics output redirected to the null
device.  If you did not do this you could see the graphs or you could
redirect it to a metacode file to later display and plot.  In this
example the input file is "test".  The final command is to restore the
graphics input to the graphics cursor.  If you don't do this you could
end up with tasks not working.  Also to rewind the commands in the
cursor.dat file requires resetting it each time.

The result of running these commands will be the trace in the file
trace.dat.

You can do variants of this and make loops over lists of images.

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Last post on Jul 16, 1999