iraf.net

Hi y'all,
I've been trying to be MSCRED installed on multiple machines in order to deal with some prime focus instrument and spectral data. Of course on both machines I ran into the much maligned error: "ERROR: task `mscred' has no param file". Now on my Mac it was a serious case of mea culpa (you all aren't joking about those trailing slashes).The other case seems to be a bit sneaky- I had issues doing a personal install of MSCRED on my desktop Unbuntu machine and asked our sys admin to install it. Unfortunately I'm running into the no param file error on this machine too. Now I checked the hlib/extern.pkg file and it does have the appropriate trailing slashes, so I'm stumped.Does anyone have any additional ideas what the problem may be? (fitz if you're reading this I did use sysinfo and have an output but to my uneducated eye it looks like it ought to be okay even though the hectospec package looks a bit unhappy.).

Erin,'No param file' is almost always related to a path problem, i.e. no trailing '/' or an incorrect path altogether. I might also mean the mscred.par file is missing, as when you install only the package binaries but not the sources, or if the tarball was corrupted and you have an incomplete installation. Remeber that package definitions in a login.cl/loginuser.cl file MUST come before the final 'keep' in the file.-Mike

Hey Mike,
The issues was not with the .par file, the binaries/sources or the paths. To get mscred to finally work correctly our sys admin logged himself in and ran a mkiraf. That fixed all the problems. So we're now adding "Use mkiraf at the end of installing a new package" in the directions of how get things to work on our system.

Hi Erin,The only way that makes sense is if the package were declared in the master login.cl file (i.e. hlib$login.cl) used as a template by MKIRAF, instead of the hlib$extern.pkg file read by all (i.e. existing) logins. In either case, the package must be defined before the final 'keep' statement, but declaring a package in the extern.pkg is preferred.-Mike