NAME
dtfits - display FITS table
SYNOPSIS
dtfits <table>
DESCRIPTION
dtfits dumps the contents of a FITS table in an ASCII format, either
into a user-specified file or on stdout. The output is formatted on a
fixed number of columns to make it readable by human beings. Additional
informations are printed out before the table values are dumped, these
informations can be skipped by using the -d option.
Last, if you want to dump the table into an easily parsable format (for
a piece of software), you might want to use the -s option which
specifies a character to use as separator. All data fields will be
printed out separated by this character only. This allows to use string
parsers to cut down the output lines into tokens by looking for this
separator. Fields (lines) will still be delimited by the end-of-line
character. This option produces ASCII tables which are easy to parse
for a piece of software but mostly unreadable to human beings.
Notice that dtfits only accepts one single FITS table in input.
OPTIONS
-d Skip information output about the table and column names.
Outputs only the table values. Beware that if the FITS file
contains several extensions, they will all appear one after
another, separated only by two blank lines. In that case, it
would be preferrable to keep the complete output and parse out
the returned stream to differentiate which data come from where.
-s <char>
Use the character <char> as separator in output. This option is
useful if you want to produce a table that should be parsed by a
piece of software (see above description). The separator can
only be a single non-null character. To avoid special characters
being interpreted by the shell, it is recommended to provide
this character always between simple or double quotes. Example:
dtfits -s ’&’ table.tfits
If you want to use a special character as separator, such as a tab, use
^V to insert your character, such as:
dtfits -s ’^V<TAB>’ table.tfits
which means: you type CTRL-V and then the tab key.
SEE ALSO
dfits
FILES
FITS tables are stored into extensions. If there are several tables in
a file, they will all be displayed one after another in the same output
stream.
22 Dec 1999 dtfits(1)