Utility applications for examining catalogues

Once you have written an application which uses the CAT library to manipulate a catalogue you will often want to examine the contents of the catalogues which the application reads or writes. The catalogue browser xcatview in the Starlink package CURSA (see SUN/190[3]) is a convenient way to examine catalogues. It can access catalogues in any of the formats supported by CAT².

Catalogues written in the STL or TST formats (see Appendix ) are text files and can be examined with standard Unix commands such as more or cat.

In addition, CAT-EXAMPLES contains two simple utilities for examining the contents of catalogues. These utilities are largely of historical interest and are less easy to use than xcatview. They are mentioned here for completeness. The utilities are:

details

reports the details of all the parameters and columns in a catalogue. All the attributes of every column and parameter are listed. The output is directed to the standard Fortran output stream.

listout

lists selected columns from a catalogue to the terminal screen or a text file, or both. You are prompted for the columns which are to be displayed.

To invoke either of these applications simply type either details or listout, as appropriate, and answer the prompts, which are self-explanatory.