Replacing obsolete ‘pappend’ task

Gabriel wrote on Apr 02, 2009

Hi,

I'm following Massey 's 'A User's Guide to CCD Reductions with IRAF' (1997), and when I get to page 56 it says I should use the obsolete task 'pappend'. My question is: which task replaces this old one (in the way it's used in the guide), 'tmerge' or 'txconcat' ?

Thanks,
Gabriel.

---

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Apr 02, 2009

The doc you mention doesn't have 56 pages, so I'm not sure what your reading. There's no record of when the pappend task was removed from the system but in the past we've suggested TMERGE as the replacement.

---

Gabriel wrote on Apr 02, 2009

I'm sorry, I wrote the wrong name. It's: 'A user's Guide to Stellar CCD Photometry with IRAF' by Massey and Davis (1992).

Thanks.

---

Gabriel wrote on Apr 02, 2009

In this address: http://iraf.noao.edu/irafnews/dec94/dec94-S-35.html, it seems as if 'pappend' was replaced by 'pconcat'.

This is the description of 'pconcat':

DESCRIPTION
PCONCAT is a simple task which accepts a list of APPHOT/DAOPHOT
database files and concatenates them into one resultant output file.
PCONCAT checks that all the file are indeed APPHOT/DAOPHOT database
files and that they were all written by the same task before
performing the concatenation.

PCONCAT is a simple script which call TXCONCAT in the PTOOLS package
if the input files are text database files or TBCONCAT in the
PTOOLS package if the input files are STSDAS database files.
TBCONCAT is itself a script which call the TABLES package task
TMERGE to do the actual work.

Since what I'm trying to concatenate are two '.mag' files (output from 'phot'), shouldn't I use the 'txconcat' task instead of the 'tmerge' (or the 'pconcat' task that will ultimately call the 'txconcat' task)?

---

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Apr 02, 2009

I think either would work. The difference is in the amount of overhead and checking being done, but tmerge is able to append tables as well.

---

Last post on Apr 02, 2009