Things to know about SPECX

There are a few basic principles and tricks which need to be introduced straight away:

• The commands

  $\gt\!\gt$ exit or quit

  get you out of SPECX, returning you to the shell prompt.

• You can abbreviate commands. For example, set-plot-device can be abbreviated to s-p-d. If the command you give is ambiguous you will have to supply more letters. In this guide I will usually give the abbreviated command and perhaps also tell you the full version. If you are unsure of the exact form of a command one way to find out is to type the first character or two; SPECX will then give you list of all the possibilities.
• Commands may be followed by whatever parameters are required or you can ask to be prompted for them; a return (enter) following the command will achieve this.
• Command sequences may be put together on one line; each command (plus its parameters, if any) should be separated from its fellows by semi-colons.
• Pressing the up-arrow key will return previous command lines in reverse order. This is one of the small things which is a big advance over VMS SPECX6.3. This can save much typing in repetitive operations, if you do not want to write a procedure. On the other hand...
• One of the strengths of SPECX is that it allows the user to create procedures containing strings of commands. This permits repetitive operations. We will offer some simple examples later.
• One can exit from a command part-way through it using Control-c. Usually this gives back the SPECX prompt along with an obscure message.
• SPECX offers both interactive and non-interactive modes. In the former case one can set parameters by clicking in a plot window. Should you find yourself mistakenly in this mode, click in the window and type `e', then exit interactive mode with the command

  $\gt\!\gt$ s-i n.

• On occasions when input parameters are required by SPECX (for baseline fit ranges, internal do loops, etc) an end-of-file (EOF) marker is required to terminate the input. It may be obvious to Unix afficionados that this is Control-d but SPECX doesn't tell you. In any case, it's different from the VMS EOF marker, so older users could be confused by this.
• One can issue shell commands from within SPECX by preceding such commands by a $ sign. For example, if I wanted to list all map files (which end with _map.sdf by convention in version 6.7) I could type:

  $\gt\!\gt$ $ ls -l *_map.sdf

  Or I could start up emacs in a separate window with the aim of making command files:

  $\gt\!\gt$ $ emacs &

  The $ sign is an echo of the VMS origins of SPECX.

• When you exit SPECX it remembers the most recent set-up you were using in a file called specx.dmp in your directory. Thus on re-entering SPECX you can restart where you left off. If you are using a different terminal/workstation, this may not be entirely correct, and it may be necessary to reset some parameters. specx.dmp is especially useful when recovering from the times when SPECX crashes. On the other hand, if you find yourself in an intractable pickle, specx.dmp may have become corrupted, and then the only solution is to delete the dump file after exiting SPECX:

  % rm specx.dmp

• If you happen to start up NETSCAPE and subsequently SPECX you may find some garish colours appearing on your screen when you jump between the display and command windows. The way around is to limit the number of colours NETSCAPE uses by invoking it with the command

  % netscape -ncols 32 &