The <task-args>
part of the command line is a
list of parameter assignments,
each giving the value of one of the named parameters belonging to
the task which is specified in the <task-name>
part.
The general form of each parameter assignment is
<param-name>=<param-value>If you want to set the parameter to the null value, which is legal for some but not all parameters, use the special string "
null
".
In some cases you can optionally leave out the <param-name>
part of the assignment (i.e. the parameter is positionally determined);
this is indicated in the task's usage description if the parameter
is described like [<param-name>=]<param-value>
rather than <param-name>=<param-value>
.
If the <param-value>
contains spaces or other special
characters, then in most cases, such as from the Unix shell, you will
have to quote it somehow. How this is done depends on your platform,
but usually surrounding the whole value in single quotes will do the trick.
Tasks may have many parameters, and you don't have to set all of them explicitly on the comand line. For a parameter which you don't set, two things can happen. In many cases, it will default to some sensible value. Sometimes however, you may be prompted for the value to use. In the latter case, a line like this will be written to the terminal:
matcher - Name of matching algorithm [sky]:This is prompting you for the value of the parameter named
matcher
. "Name of matching algorithm" is a short
description of what that parameter does. "sky
" is
the default value (if there is no default, no value will appear
in square brackets).
At this point you can do one of four things:
null
".null
" means the null value,
which is legal for some, but not all parameters.
If the value you enter is not legal, you will see an error
message and you will be invited to try again. help
" or a question mark "?
".
This will output a message
giving a detailed description of the parameter
and prompt you again.stilts
command itself (see Section 2.1).
If you supply the -prompt
flag, then you will be prompted
for every parameter you have not explicitly set. If you supply
-batch
on the other hand, you won't be prompted for
any parameters (and if you fail to set any without legal default
values, the task will fail).
If you want to see the actual values of the parameters for a task
as it runs,
including prompted values and defaulted ones
which you haven't specified explicitly,
you can use the -verbose
flag after the stilts
command:
% stilts -verbose tcopy cat.fits cat.vot ifmt=fits INFO: tcopy in=cat.fits out=cat.vot ifmt=fits ofmt=(auto)
Extensive help is available from stilts
itself about task and its parameters, as described in the next section.