File Names

Two problems may arise when running GILDAS under Unix. The first one is due to the use of the as an option separator in SIC, and as a tree/subtree separator in pathnames under Unix. The second is that SIC is normally case unsensitive, while Unix is case sensitive. To alleviate these problems, filenames are treated in the following way under GILDAS

• By default, automatic conversion to lower case is done
• Logical names (as defined above) can be used to refer to a file name. For example, GAG_LOG:TOTO.LOG will be expanded to /users/me/toto.log if /users/me is the equivalent name of GAG_LOG:
• To prevent case translation, the filename should be preceded by an exclamation mark (!). Since the exclamation mark is normally the comment flag in SIC commands, the whole filename should be included within double quotes. To illustrate this behaviour, compare these two examples

      Typed named          Expanded Filename
    "Toto.Log"           toto.log
    "!Toto.Log"          Toto.Log
    "gag_log:Toto.Log"   /users/me/toto.log
    "!gag_log:Toto.Log"  /users/me/Toto.Log
  

• As shown above, logical name translation occurs even when an exclamation mark precedes the filename.
• VMS-like names can be typed and will be translated to Unix-like names.

      Typed named                    Expanded Filename
    GAG_LOG:[SUB.DIRE]TOTO.LOG     /users/me/sub/dire/toto.log
    "!gag_log:[SUB.dire]Toto.Dat"  /users/me/SUB/dire/Toto.Dat
  

• DOS-like names can also be typed and will be translated to Unix-like names.

      Typed named                    Expanded Filename
    \users\me\toto.log             /users/me/toto.log
    "!sub\DIRE\Toto.Dat"           sub/DIRE/toto.dat
  

Filename handling is somewhat cumbersome, but becomes very simple when filenames are kept simple and lower case, as often happens.