iraf.net

I am looking for a way to either customize the default splot.log file, or to create an additional log file which only records certain data. I've searched online but haven't found anything to this effect. Any ideas? Thanks!Ezra

The best you can do is use the ":# <comment>" command to add a comment to the file or toggle it on or off, the filename and what gets written to it aren't configurable. A task like FIELDS can be used to extract columns from a text file but you'll need to find some other ways to remove e.g. the date string and blank lines. Depending on exactly what information you want, there may (or may not) be other tasks that would do the job.

Thank you for your response.I've been working with a set of spectra data for the last several days, and roughly 50% of my time involves direct copying and typing of splot data from the graph. The splot.log is doing nearly exactly what I'm doing, so I was persuing to connect the two by just customizing the splot.log output. I'm new to the IRAF environment, is it open source? I would like to contribute time in case you think some development to this end could be managed.Thanks again, I'll keep playing with it.

The source code for IRAF has always been available and you're free to do with it what you like. In this case, see the code in $iraf/noao/onedspec/splot. The logfile stuff gets written in procedures in e.g. eqwidth.x or deblend.x so you'll need to find the command you use and trace it from there (see 'splot.x').If you decide to go ahead an tackle this I can talk you through what's needed to recompile the task locally on your machine. If you have general suggestions about what might be a useful addition we could perhaps add that here and get you a patched binary. Anyway, good luck.