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A.4.1 Usage

The basic usage of votlint is

    votlint [<flags>] [<in-file>]
If you don't have the Unix scripts installed, invoke it as described in Section 2 using the classname uk.ac.starlink.ttools.VotLint.

If <in-file> is omitted then the document to be checked is read from standard input. <in-file> may be a filename or URL, and may represent a VOTable compressed using one of the supported compression formats (gzip, Unix compress and bzip2).

The flags, which may be given in any order, are as follows:

-novalid
Prevents validation against the VOTable DTD. Normally, as well as votlint's own checks on the submitted document, it is validated against an appropriate version of the VOTable DTD which picks up such things as the existence of unknown elements and attributes, elements in the wrong place, and so on. Sometimes however, particularly when XML namespaces are involved, the validator can get confused and may produce a lot of spurious errors. Specifying the -novalid flag prevents this validation step so that only votlint's checks are performed. In this case a few, but by no means all violations of the VOTable standard concerning document structure will be picked up.
-version <vers>
Selects the VOTable version which the input table is supposed to exemplify. Currently <vers> can be 1.0 or 1.1. The version may be noted within the document using the version attribute of the document's VOTABLE element; if it is and it conflicts with the version specified using this flag, a warning is issued.
-h[elp]
Prints a usage message and exits.
-debug
Causes any error messages, which are usually made brief, to be accompanied by a stack trace. If you are reporting a bug (or debugging the code yourself), then you should use this flag to get the most information about what has gone wrong.


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STILTS - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set
Starlink User Note 256
STILTS web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk