NAME

mergerays - merge a bunch of bpipe streams into a single stream

DESCRIPTION

mergerays takes as input two or more bpipe streams and merges them. There are several possible merge methods:

Manners of Merging

Merging disparate data packets

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.

Transferring header fields to data packets

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.

Merging Header fields

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.

PARAMETERS

mergerays uses an IRAF-compatible parameter interface.

input

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.

output

The output bpipe stream. It may be stdout, in which case the stream will be written to the standard output stream.

method

How the streams should be combined. This may be one of time, cat, sample, or auto. See "Manners of Merging" for more information.

xfer

A comma separated list of header fields which should be moved into the data packets. See "Transferring header fields to data packets".

help

If yes, print out this message and exit

version

If yes, the version is output to the standard output stream, and the program exits.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

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.html

VERSION

This documents version 1.2.1 of mergerays.

AUTHOR

Dan Nguyen <dnguyen@cfa.harvard.edu>

Diab Jerius <djerius@cfa.harvard.edu>