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Another group of options that are common to all the programs in Gnuastro are those to do with the general operation of the programs. The explanation for those that are not only limited to Gnuastro but can be called in all GNU programs start with (GNU option).
(GNU option) Stop parsing the command line. This option can be useful in scripts or when using the shell history. Suppose you have a long list of options, and want to see if removing some of them (and using the default values) can give a better result. If the ones you want to remove are the last ones on the command line, you don’t have to delete them, you can just add -- before them and if you don’t get what you want, you can remove the -- and get the same initial result.
(GNU option) Only print the options and arguments. This is very useful for when you know the what the options do, you have just forgot their names. See --usage.
(GNU option) Print all options and an explanation. Adding this option will print all the options in their short and long formats, also displaying which ones need a value if they are called (with an = after the long format). A short explanation is also given for what the option is for. The program will quit immediately after the message is printed and will not do any form of processing. See --help.
(GNU option) Print a short message, showing the full name, version, copyright information and program authors. On the first line it will print the official name (not executable name) and version number of the program. It will also print the version of the Gnuastro that the program was built with. Following this is a blank line and a copyright information. The program will not run.
Don’t report steps. All the programs in Gnuastro that have multiple major steps will report their steps for you to follow while they are operating. If you do not want to see these reports, you can call this option and only error messages will be printed if the program is aborted. If the steps are done very fast (depending on the properties of your input) disabling these reports will also decrease running time.
Print the BibTeX entry for Gnuastro and the particular program (if that program comes with a separate paper) and abort. Citations are vital for the continued work on Gnuastro. Gnuastro started and is continued based on separate research projects. So if you find any of the tools offered in Gnuastro to be useful in your research, please use the output of this command to cite the program and Gnuastro in your research paper. Thank you.
GNU Astronomy Utilities is still new, there is no separate paper only devoted to Gnuastro yet. Therefore currently the paper to cite for Gnuastro is the paper for NoiseChisel which is the first published paper introducing Gnuastro to the astronomical community. Upon reaching a certain point, a paper completely devoted to Gnuastro will be published, see GNU Astronomy Utilities 1.0.
Print the final values used for all the parameters and abort. See Final parameter values, reproduce previous results for more details.
Update the current directory configuration file from the given command line options and quit, see Configuration files. The values of your options are added to the configuration file in the current directory. If the configuration file or folder doesn’t exist, it will be created. If it exists but has different values for those options, they will be given the new values. In any case, the program will not run, but the contents of its updated configuration file are printed for you to inspect.
This is the recommended method to fill the configuration file for all future calls to one of the Gnuastro programs in a folder. It will internally check if your values are in the correct range and type and save them according to the configuration file format, see Configuration file format.
When this option is called, the otherwise mandatory arguments, for example input image or catalog file(s), are no longer mandatory (since the program will not run).
Update the user configuration file from the command line options and quit. See explanation under --setdirconf for more details.
Only read the current (local) directory configuration file and ignore the rest of the configuration files, see Configuration file precedence and Current directory and User wide. This can be very useful when you want your results to be exactly reproducible. All the configuration files can be put in the hidden ./.gnuastro/ directory in the current directory, or the hidden directory can be a symbolic link to the directory containing the configuration files. Then with this option you can ensure that no other configuration file is read. So if your local configuration file lacks some parameters, which ever Gnuastro utility you are using will will warn you and abort, enabling you to exactly set all the necessary parameters without unknowningly relying on some user or system wide option values.
onlydirconf can also be used in the configuration files (with a value of 0 or 1), see Configuration file format. If it is present in the local configuration file, other configuration files will not be read. In the other configuration files, it is irrelevant.
(=STR) Only run the program if its version is equal with the string of characters given to this option. Note that it is not compared as a number, but as a string of characters, so 0, or 0.0 and 0.00 are different. This is useful if you want your results to be exactly reproducible and not mistakenly run with an updated or older version of the program.
For programs which generate Log files, if this option is called, no Log file will be generated.
(=INT) Set the number of CPU threads to use. See Threads in GNU Astronomy Utilities.
Previous: Input output, Up: Common options [Contents][Index]
Read in other formats.
GNU Astronomy Utilities manual, November 2015.