iraf.net

I have a computer that has 3 drives in it. The first contains the operating system and all it's associated directories. The second two are mounted as data drives off the root (/) directory.

Iraf works just fine on files on the system drive but whenever I try to operate on files on the two data direcories (/charon and /styx on this computer) and their subdirectories, I get errors like the following:

IRAF error 741: Cannot open file (charon.byu.edu!/styx/data2/HSTData/NICMOS/reference/sbj1738an_flt.fits)

I own all the directories and files in question and so have full read/write permissions. Any ideas why this would be happening on these two drives and not on the main one? And moving the files to the main drive is not really an options as the system drive is a small SSD while the data drives are 2TB and 5TB in size. The data wouldn't even fit.

Are you using a 32-bit IRAF system, i.e. a 'linux' or 'macosx' architecture name rather than 'linux64' or 'macintel' (use the "show arch" command in the CL to find out). If so, the problem is the large drives are using 64-bit inodes the 32-bit binaries can't handle. Note that distributions like Ureka and AstroConda only include 32-bit IRAF software.

That might be the problem. Although it seems to work fine for some commands and not for others. Specifically, we're trying to use some of the STSDAS packages, in this case the pedsky command in hst_calib/nicmos. I just tried a 64-bit version only of iraf in a local install and that didn't work either. Of course, there are so many IRAFs installed that my environment might be all messed up but I think I'm just using the 64bit version.

It's not so much that it works for some commands and not others as it is that tasks will work on some files but not others (i.e. if the inode falls in the 32-bit range it doesn't matter what the iraf binary is). STScI long ago decided to NOT port STSDAS/TABLES to 64-bit and now distributes only 32-bit binaries. Even if you wanted to do the port yourself (a simple recompile won't do), a licensing issue with Numerical Recipes means they don't even distribute all the source code necessary to rebuild the package (although you can find these sources in older distributions and patch it back together if you're desperate). For TABLES tasks you can use the UTILITIES.NTTOOLS taskswhich are a 64-bit port of some key TABLES tasks/libraries.

IRAF will happily use a mixed architecture environment so it may be that you indeed have 64-bit IRAF but only 32-bit STSDAS. I haven't tried it, but you might see whether a symlink on your system disk to the data might be a workaround. Otherwise, is it possible to create a small partition on the larger disks as a working directory or do you need the full 2/5 TB?