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 (US).
Please refer any problems with these pages to Duncan Law-Green (ledas-help@star.le.ac.uk).

Individual Tool Selections

Sometimes, a person who is not doing extensive data analysis may need to perform some simple operations on FITS files, involving a basic Ftool or two. For example, converting FITS files to text files or plotting a table's contents. For such individuals, it is overkill (or not feasible) to download and install the entire Ftools package to get at just one or two basic utility tools. Therefore, ...

Listed below are some of the most commonly requested Ftools tasks. Select and download only those that you need. If you need a tool not listed here and cannot install the standard Ftools, write to us at ftoolshelp. Individuals doing data analysis should instead download either the source or binary distribution described on the HEAsoft release page.

Important Note for CYGWIN users: Please see the README.CYGWIN document before using HEAsoft 5.3.1 tools in the Cygwin environment. Also, the HEAsoft 5.3.1 pre-compiled binaries are not likely to work with versions of Cygwin earlier than 1.5.9 (the version these binaries were compiled under) due to changes in the Cygwin DLL and in the X11R6 libraries. If you have problems running the binaries, please check your version of Cygwin (try the "uname -a" command) and upgrade if necessary (or build from source).

First, select your system...

Then, select the tools you want...
A "do-nothing" tool with powerful features (fcopy help file).
Other help files which may be useful: filenames, column filtering, row filtering, and histogramming. (Note: these help files apply to all tools.)
Dump contents of a FITS table to an ASCII file (fdump help file)
Modify the header keywords in a FITS file (fmodhead help file)
Plots columns from a FITS file using QDP/PLT Plot Package (fplot help file)
Verify that a FITS file conforms to the FITS Standard (fverify help file)
Return hydrogen column density for a given RA and Dec. (nh help file)
Create a FITS file from an ASCII template file. (ftemplate help file)

Now, hit download... (if you experience problems using FTP to download this software, click here)

Finally, unzip and untar the file you downloaded. A new subdirectory called basic-tools will be created. In it will be an architecturally-named subdirectory (eg, "linux_pc") which contains all the tools you selected. Follow the directions in the README file in this subdirectory to use the tools. Also read the included filenames.txt and related help files to learn how to use the extended filename syntax, which provides access to many additional useful features, such as automatic table filtering, histogramming, and reading files over the internet.

This is the LEDAS (UK) mirror of the HEASARC LHEASoft archive.
HEASARC web pages maintained by Bryan K. Irby. Helplines for FTOOLS and XANADU @ HEASARC.
UK mirror maintained by: Dr. Duncan Law-Green, LEDAS Support Scientist (ledas-help@star.le.ac.uk), (0116)252-2589.
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