As well as the command descriptions in this document (especially the reference section Appendix B) you can get help for STILTS usage from the command itself. Typing
stilts -helpresults in this output:
Usage: stilts [-help] [-version] [-verbose] [-memory] [-disk] [-debug] [-prompt] [-batch] [-bench] [-memgui] [-checkversion <vers>] [-stdout <file>] [-stderr <file>] <task-name> <task-args> stilts <task-name> help[=<param-name>|*] Known tasks: calc coneskymatch funcs pixfoot pixsample plot2d plot3d plothist regquery server sqlclient sqlskymatch sqlupdate taplint tapquery tapresume tcat tcatn tcopy tcube tjoin tloop tmatch1 tmatch2 tmatchn tmulti tmultin tpipe tskymatch2 votcopy votlint
For help on the individual tasks, including their parameter lists,
you can supply the word help
after the task name, so for instance
stilts tcopy helpresults in
Usage: tcopy ifmt=<in-format> ofmt=<out-format> [in=]<table> [out=]<out-table>
Finally, you can get help on any of the parameters of a task
by writing help=<param-name>
, like this:
stilts tcopy help=ingives
Help for parameter IN in task TCOPY ----------------------------------- Name: in Usage: [in=]<table> Summary: Location of input table Description: The location of the input table. This is usually a filename or URL, and may point to a file compressed in one of the supported compression formats (Unix compress, gzip or bzip2). If it is omitted, or equal to the special value "-", the input table will be read from standard input. In this case the input format must be given explicitly using the ifmt parameter.If you use "
*
" instead of a parameter name in this usage,
help for all the parameters will be printed. Note that in most shells
you will probably need to quote the asterisk, so you should write
stilts tcopy help='*'
In some cases, as described in Section 2.3, you will be prompted for the value of a parameter with a line something like this:
matcher - Name of matching algorithm [sky]:In this case, if you enter "
help
" or a question mark,
then the parameter help entry will be printed to the screen, and
the prompt will be repeated.
For more detailed descriptions of the tasks, which includes explanatory comments and examples as well as the information above, see the full task descriptions in the Command Reference.