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## 10 Invoking TOPCAT

Starting up TOPCAT may just be a case of typing "`topcat`" or clicking on an appropriate icon and watching the Control Window pop up. If that is the case, and it's running happily for you, you can probably ignore this section. What follows is a description of how to start the program up, and various command line arguments and configuration options which can't be changed from within the program. Some examples are given in Section 10.5. Actually obtaining the program is not covered here; please see the TOPCAT web page http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/.

There are various ways of starting up TOPCAT depending on how (and whether) it has been installed on your system; some of these are described below.

There may be some sort of short-cut icon on your desktop which starts up the program - in this case just clicking on it will probably work. Failing that you may be able to locate the jar file (probably named `topcat.jar`, `topcat-full.jar` or `topcat-lite.jar`) and click on that. These files would be located in the `java/lib/topcat/` directory in a standard Starjava installation. Note that when you start by clicking on something you may not have the option of entering any of the command line options described below - to use these options, which you may need to do for serious use of the program, you will have to run the program from the command line.

Alternatively you will have to invoke the program from the command line. On Unix-like operating systems, you can use the `topcat` script. If you have the full starjava installation, this is probably in the starjava/java/bin directory. If you have one of the standalone jar files (topcat-full.jar or topcat-lite.jar), it should be in the same directory as it/them. If it's not there, you can unpack it from the jar file itself, using a command like `unzip topcat-lite.jar topcat`. If that directory (and java) is on your path then you can write:

       topcat [java-args] [topcat-args]

In this case any arguments which start `-D` or `-X` are assumed to be arguments to the java command, any arguments which start `-J` are stripped of the `-J` and then passed as arguments to the java command, a `-classpath` path defines a class path to be used in addition to the TOPCAT classes, and any remaining arguments are used by TOPCAT.

If you're not running Unix then to start from the command line you will have to use the `java` command itself. The most straightforward way of doing this will look like:

       java [java-args] -jar path/to/topcat.jar [topcat-args]

(or the same for `topcat-full.jar` etc). However NOTE: using java's `-jar` flag ignores any other class path information, such as the CLASSPATH environment variable or java's `-classpath` flag - see Section 10.2.1.

Note that Java Web Start can also be used to invoke the program without requiring any prior download/installation - sorry, this isn't documented properly here yet.

The meaning of the optional `[topcat-args]` and `[java-args]` sequences are described in Section 10.1 and Section 10.2 below respectively.

- 10.1 TOPCAT Command-line Arguments
- 10.2 Java Options

- 10.2.1 Class Path
- 10.2.2 Memory Size
- 10.2.3 System properties

- 10.3 JDBC Configuration
- 10.4 Tips for Large Tables
- 10.5 Examples

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TOPCAT - Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables
Starlink User Note253
TOPCAT web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
Mailing list: topcat-user@bristol.ac.uk