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2.5 System Properties

System properties are a way of getting information into the Java runtime - they are a bit like environment variables. There are two ways to set them when using STILTS: either on the command line using arguments of the form -Dname=value (see Section 2.2) or in a file in your home directory called .starjava.properties, in the form of a name=value line. Thus submitting the flag

    -Dvotable.strict=true
on the command line is equivalent to having the following in your .starjava.properties file:
    #  Force strict interpretation of the VOTable standard.
    votable.strict=true

The following system properties have special significance to STILTS:

java.io.tmpdir
The directory in which STILTS will write any temporary files it needs. This is usually only done if the -disk flag has been specified (see Section 2.4).
jdbc.drivers
Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of JDBC driver classes using which SQL databases can be accessed (see Section 2.6).
jel.classes
Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of classes containing static methods which define user-provided functions for synthetic columns or subsets. (see Section 4.6.3).
startable.readers
Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of custom table format input handler classes (see SUN/252).
startable.storage
Can be set to determine the default storage policy. Setting it to "disk" has basically the same effect as supplying the "-disk" argument on the command line (see Section 2.4).
startable.writers
Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of custom table format output handler classes (see SUN/252).
votable.strict
Set true for strict enforcement of the VOTable standard when parsing VOTables. This prevents the parser from working round certain common errors, such as missing arraysize attributes on FIELD or PARAM elements with datatype="char". False by default.


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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