imaccess specification

[Jason Quinn]

Where can I read the language specification for imaccess? I have a situation where I added some bad-pixel mask support to a script. Since there are now two extensions corresponding to each image filename (one for a fits file and the other for the pl mask), the logic of the script is now no longer correct because it returns "no" when I expect it to return yes. Here is a snippet showing the problem.

[fitz]

Hi Jason,

I just added a help page for the next release. The function is supposed to mimic the same function in the SPP code, however the CL imaccess() is a boolean and the SPP version is an integer function. For the SPP code, the func returns YES/NO/ERR where ERR is the return value when the image name may be ambiguous (e.g. a foo.fits and foo.pl in the same directory). As currently implemented, a 'yes' is returned by the CL function only when the image exists and is unambiguous, so by supplying the extension you should also be able to get the expected answer.

I'm not sure whether the behavior should be changed or not since an ambiguous filename is an error that may be triggered later, so the thinking is that having imaccess() fail provides more control over your error checking. I can tell you how to easily change this if you're interested.

Cheers,
-Mike