This is a part of the UK Mirror of the HEASARC HEAsoft pages, maintained by LEDAS. All HEAsoft-related links on this page are to HTML files or data stored at Leicester, unless indicated by a . Please refer any problems with these pages to Duncan Law-Green (ledas-help@star.le.ac.uk).

Introduction

FTOOLS is a collection of utility programs used to create, examine, or modify the contents of FITS data files. There are also user friendly GUI tools which allow interactive browsing of FITS files and provide a more intuitive interface for running the FTOOLS. The FTOOLS package forms the core of the HEASARC software system for reducing and analyzing data in the FITS format.

Each FTOOLS task is a separate program that performs a single simple operation. The FTOOLS are primarily a Unix based package, although a Windows version was created for version 4.2 (a 5.0 version is in the works). Most of the powerful GUI interfaces run only on Unix, although the core GUI tool, fv, is available for Unix, Windows, and MacOS. Further discussion of supported platforms is available in the FTOOLS FAQ. Scripts are available for combining several FTOOLS to perform complex tasks. All of the core FTOOLS programs share several common design features:

• All are written in ANSI Fortran or C;
• All use a simple standardized subroutine interface for getting the value of program parameters (e.g., the name of the input FITS file), and;
• All data I/O is restricted to FITS files via the FITSIO subroutine interface (or to simple ASCII format in certain cases).
• All scripts are written in Perl5 (although many will work in Perl4). Note: The official Perl5.001 release doesn't work with all ftools scripts (due to a bug in the Perl code). To run ftools perl scripts, you will need "unofficial patchlevel" 5.001m or higher.
• The GUI tools are written in Tcl/Tk: Currently there are fv (an interactive FITS file browser/editor), flaunch (a powerful GUI interface to the FTOOLS), and xdf (the XTE Data Finder). The FTOOLS distribution contains the source for the Tcl/Tk interpreters that these tools need to run and will build them for you. You do not need to install Tcl or Tk separately on your system.

These design decisions have resulted in a software package that is exceptionally portable and can be integrated into new environments with a minimum of modification to the source code.

Useful Links

• Getting the Software

  • Latest FTOOLS Release: Information and Downloading
  • How to Install and Setup the FTOOLS
  • List of Known Bugs
  • Mirror Sites: United States (original) and Japan
  
  

• Getting Started

  • Introduction to FTOOLS
  • A Quick FTOOLS Tutorial
  • The FTOOLS subpackages
  
  

• Deeper Information

  • The FTOOLS Frequently Asked Questions File Please read before sending a question. It's faster :)
  • Users' Guide to the FTOOLS (out of date)
  • Other miscellaneous FTOOLS documents including documents specifically for FTOOLS developers!
  • The FTOOLS Team
  • The FTOOLS email help line