Man page - stilts-tcopy(1)

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STILTS-TCOPY(1) Stilts commands STILTS-TCOPY(1)

stilts-tcopy - Converts between table formats

stilts tcopy [in=<table>] [out=<out-table>] [ifmt=<in-format>] [ofmt=<out-format>]

tcopy is a table copying tool. It simply copies a table from one place to another, but since you can specify the input and output formats as desired, it works as a converter from any of the supported input formats to any of the supported output formats.

tcopy is just a stripped-down version of tpipe - it doesn't do anything that tpipe can't, but the usage is slightly simplified. It is provided as a drop-in replacement for the old tablecopy (uk.ac.starlink.table.TableCopy) tool which was supplied with earlier versions of STIL and TOPCAT - it has the same arguments and behaviour as tablecopy, but is implemented somewhat differently and will in some cases be more efficient.

The location of the input table. This may take one of the following forms:

  • A filename.
  • A URL.
  • The special value "-", meaning standard input. In this case the input format must be given explicitly using the ifmt parameter. Note that not all formats can be streamed in this way.
  • A scheme specification of the form :<scheme-name>:<scheme-args>.
  • A system command line with either a "<" character at the start, or a "|" character at the end ("<syscmd" or "syscmd|"). This executes the given pipeline and reads from its standard output. This will probably only work on unix-like systems.

In any case, compressed data in one of the supported compression formats (gzip, Unix compress or bzip2) will be decompressed transparently.

The location of the output table. This is usually a filename to write to. If it is equal to the special value "-" (the default) the output table will be written to standard output.

Specifies the format of the input table as specified by parameter in. The known formats are listed in SUN/256. This flag can be used if you know what format your table is in. If it has the special value (auto) (the default), then an attempt will be made to detect the format of the table automatically. This cannot always be done correctly however, in which case the program will exit with an error explaining which formats were attempted. This parameter is ignored for scheme-specified tables.

Specifies the format in which the output table will be written (one of the ones in SUN/256 - matching is case-insensitive and you can use just the first few letters). If it has the special value "(auto)" (the default), then the output filename will be examined to try to guess what sort of file is required usually by looking at the extension. If it's not obvious from the filename what output format is intended, an error will result.

stilts(1)

If the package stilts-doc is installed, the full documentation SUN/256 is available in HTML format:
file:///usr/share/doc/stilts/sun256/index.html

STILTS version 3.5.2-debian

This is the Debian version of Stilts, which lack the support of some file formats and network protocols. For differences see
file:///usr/share/doc/stilts/README.Debian

Mark Taylor (Bristol University)

Mar 2017