pyraf crashing when I attempt to use an interactive window

gdrude wrote on Dec 31, 2009

I am having some difficulty getting an interactive window setup in pyraf. When I run a command like splot or implot pyraf will crash and leave a rather cryptic error. The plot window will appear on the screen, but will not be interactive. Then it will crash. I am using Mac OSX 10.5.8, with python 2.6 and the latest pyraf release. Thank you.

--> implot dev$pix

PANIC in `/Applications/scisoft//all/Packages/iraf/iraf/bin.macintel/x_plot.e': Write to IPC with no reader
Bus error

Any help would be appreciated. I have been actively google for similar problems and have not had much luck finding a solution. Thank you.

Gerald Rude

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Dec 31, 2009

A 'write to IPC with no reader' generically just means communications to another process were interrupted, e.g. the display server dies in the middle of a display. In this case, it would appear that pyraf died while the graphics stream was being sent.

If you don't get another answer here, you might contact the help desk at STScI (help@stsci.edu) to see if this is a known problem, or you might contact the SciSoft folks to see if this is a known issue in the latest release. Python 2.6 is supposed to be supported now, however you might check that you have the proper versions of the other needed packages.

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gdrude wrote on Dec 31, 2009

I just sent an email to the help desk. It is almost as though I read your mind. I am heading off to the AAS meeting and was hoping to do some analysis on the plane this weekend. I will take your advice and check that I have the correct packages installed. This may call for drastic measures in that I may have to reinstall the scisoft package and port all of my pyraf scripts to python 2.4 compatible code... this is not a plesant thought. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question... wish me luck.

Cheers,
Gerald Rude

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Last post on Dec 31, 2009