Writing tasks that accept lists and wildcards

[sirmarcos]

What is the trick to allow a task to accept wildcards like file*imh or @filelist?

I have written a very basic task that just passes arguments to another iraf task. I call it qcont and it just takes the file, does a continuum on it with a 1st order spline3 and makes the output file_norm. It works like a charm on one file, but it's unclear to me how I alter the task to accept a list of files... any help or pointers would be appreciated.

[fitz]

Hi Marcos,

I assume we're talking about a CL script? If so the trick is to use something like the SECTIONS (or FILES if it isn't an image) task to expand the template, e.g.

[sirmarcos]

Thanks. That's pretty much what I was asking ... I just wanted to be able to add the @list functionality that most tasks have. And yes, it was a cl script I had written, so the input was just a string, the file name.

I've written cl scripts that accept lists using the fscan loop like you mentioned, but then the input has to be a list, so I'm guessing the "is it a list or is it a file" determination based on whether the @ is there or not is just a matter of parsing the string and using if statements to handle the file as either an image or a list?

[fitz]

The SECTIONS task will expand file templates and @files automatically, i.e.

sections foo.fits
sections @flist
sections foo*.fits

will expand the single file name, the contents of the @file, or the wildcard template. Note however that

section flist

will return just 'flist' and not the expanded contents as if you'd used '@flist'.

-Mike