iraf.net

I currently have iraf version 2.16.1 and ds9 version 7.3.2, all with mac osx 10.9.5.
I'm pretty new to iraf and I'm having some issues using the 'display' command with ds9. I get an error saying "Cannot open device (node!imtool,,512,512)".
I think this might be because I installed a newer version of ds9 on my mac and now every time I open ds9 I get a message saying "DS9 has detected a newer version of a preferences file and therefore will not process this file". ds9 still works on its own, I just can't open any images with iraf's display command, which I need! So how do I get the preferences file to match my version of ds9, and will this fix my iraf error? Thanks

This is a bug in recent versions of DS9. The solution is to specify the inet socket to be used for display in the unix environment before you login to iraf, e.g.

setenv IMTDEV inet:5137 # for a C-shell
or
export IMTDEV=inet:5137 # for a Bash shell

You can put this in your startup files (e.g. .login/.cshrc/.bashrc) to make the change permanent, otherwise installing an older version of DS9 will also work (and could avoid another potential bug in cursor reads).

This worked perfectly, thank you! And I apologize for my naivety, but how would I go about adding this "export IMTDEV..." to my startup files?

You would use an editor such as 'vi' or 'emacs' or textedit. The file may or may not already exist in your account so you'll need to create it if not.