Issuing CONVERT Commands

Having initialised CONVERT you are now ready to issue a CONVERT command. To run an application you can just give its name (or its name preceded by con_²)--you will be prompted for any required parameters. Alternatively, you may enter parameter values on the command line specified by position or by keyword. If you want to override any defaulted parameters, then you specify the parameter's value on the command line. Note that from UNIX the commands are in lowercase, whereas from ICL the case does not matter.

Most CONVERT applications can be run as simply as:

     <application> <in> <out>

where $<$application$>$ is the application's name, $<$in$>$ is the input file, and $<$out$>$ is the output file following the conversion. For instance, from the UNIX shell,

     % dst2ndf old new

or, from ICL,

     ICL> DST2NDF old new

both instruct the application DST2NDF to convert the DST file called old.dst to the NDF called new.sdf. Note that for UNIX, the case of the filename is significant.

The following example has the same effect as those immediately above, only this time you are prompted for the filenames needed by DST2NDF.

     ICL> DST2NDF
     IN - Name of Figaro (.DST) file to be converted /' '/ > old
     OUT - Name of output NDF /@f1/ > new

The value between the / / delimiters is a suggested default. You can choose to accept the suggestion by pressing carriage return.

The simple usage, (<application> <in> <out>), will usually produce a result but many applications have additional parameters which you can set to give finer control over the conversion. See the application specifications for details of the options available.

You can find details of how to use parameters for controlling Starlink program options in SUN/95 or in section `Specifying Parameter Values' of SG/4. However, you should be able to get along using intuition alone, or, perhaps by consulting the application specifications , which include usage, parameters, examples and details of the conversion process.

In most cases, one invocation of a CONVERT application is required for each file conversion but in some cases, inputs may be defined as `GROUPS' of names, including wildcards (see the application specifications for details).