xgterm problems

[JCab]

I am now having a devil of a time with a problem with xgterm OUTSIDE of IRAF. Just to be clear, I am running the current version of MacOS (10.4.10) using Apple's current version of X11 and using the Scisoft PPC beta installation of IRAF and X11IRAF.

The issue is that the folks at Harvard have set up their reduction scripts for the Hectospec on the MMT to call IRAF routines from shell scripts to allow parallel processing. Here's the interesting bit. I have run some of their software under IRAF directly and it worked properly (running in xgterm). However, when run from their script under xterm with Tek emulation, this particular IRAF command upchucks. So I thought to just replace the call for xterm with xgterm. This crashes nastily as I show here:

[By Your Command]> xgterm -e callhectospec hcal comp.ms
Error in message to server, line 6: send: could not find object gterm
while executing
"send gterm setGterm"
xgterm Xt error: Shell widget gterm-iraf has zero width and/or height

I have looked on Google and found that people seem to believe the solution is to remove the /private/etc/X11/app-defaults/XGterm file, but when I do, I get a non-interactive Xgterm window (mouse clicks and the like don't take). I have also played with the suggestion to set the environmental variable DYLD_FORCE_FLAT_NAMESPACE to no effect. Have anyone here heard anything else about how to resolve this?

[JCab]

At the suggestion of Marcos Huerta, I decided to try installing the v1.5DEV binaries of xgterm, since I believe SciSoft OSX used version 1.3. Still no joy in mudville, xgterm still strikes out with a zero width and/or height error.

[fitz]

What kind of script is 'callhectospec', some unix shell or a #!cl script? If the latter, does it do anything to initialize the environment (in this case the 'stdgraph' or some 'stty' command)? Are there any resources set in your .Xdefaults file dealing with xgterm? If the script isn't too long could you post at least the first parts of it dealing with the initialization. As a test, you might try executing the #!cl script:

[JCab]

[fitz]

TERM is a general unix/linux environment variable that points to some entry in the system terminfo/termcap database, but since 'xgterm' isn't going to be in that database setting the TERM=xgterm will only confuse other apps and wouldn't be recognized by the '-tn' commandline flag to set TERM automatically anyway. A not-so-foolproof method would be to search the process table with a 'ps' command to see if an xgterm is running on the current tty, but in a pipeline environment like yours it's generally easier to be sure you're spawning an xgterm directly.

Be careful though of other initializations such as redirecting from some global loginuser.cl to pick up definitions.