mergerays - merge a bunch of bpipe streams into a single stream
mergerays takes as input two or more bpipe streams and merges them. There are several possible merge methods:
merging based upon rays' time tags
simple concatenation
sampling from the streams based upon the number of rays in each stream. This method depends upon the ray streams having valid ray counts in their headers.
It's possible that the input streams don't all have the same data packet structure. In that case the intersection of the fields should be output. If there are one-dimensional arrays with differing extents, the maximum number of extents should be kept, trimming off the higher indexed elements first (i.e., remove foo[2] before foo[1]). Fields with dimensions greater than one with differing extents should not be kept.
Fields with the same name but different definitions should also be excluded. The program will log all non-intuitive actions.
Certain header fields should be transformed into data packet fields if they don't have the same value in every stream (e.g. the shell field). These fields are denoted by the xfer parameter.
Because bpipe headers may contain more than one instance of a field, header fields will simply be added to the output header in the order that they occur. Fields which have different definitions will be excluded.
mergerays uses an IRAF-compatible parameter interface.
A comma separated list of the names of the streams to be merged. One of the names may be stdin, indicating that the rays will be read from the standard input stream.
The output bpipe stream. It may be stdout, in which case the stream will be written to the standard output stream.
How the streams should be combined. This may be one of time, cat, sample, or auto. See "Manners of Merging" for more information.
A comma separated list of header fields which should be moved into the data packets. See "Transferring header fields to data packets".
If yes, print out this message and exit
If yes, the version is output to the standard output stream, and the program exits.
Copyright 2006 Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
This software is released under the GNU General Public License. You may find a copy at
http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.htmlThis documents version 1.2.1 of mergerays.
Dan Nguyen <dnguyen@cfa.harvard.edu>
Diab Jerius <djerius@cfa.harvard.edu>