Strings

Notice that the single or double quotes around strings given in response to prompts for a character parameter can be omitted. However, on the command line these delimiters are needed if the string contains spaces, otherwise the second and subsequent words could be treated as separate positional parameters.

From the shell the quotes must be escaped. For example,

     % settitle myndf \"A new title\"

would assign the title "A new title" to the NDF called myndf.

To indicate that the parameter should come from a data-structure object, prefix the name with an @ to tell the parameter system that it is a file name, and not a literal value.

     TITLE - New NDF title /' '/ @$ADAM_USER/galaxy.mytitle

In this example TITLE has the value of object MYTITLE in galaxy.sdf. If the @ were omitted TITLE would be "$ADAM_USER/galaxy.mytitle". You will need the @ prefix if your file name is a number. Note that the file extension should not be included when giving the name of an HDS  data file, including NDFs . Otherwise HDS will look for an object called SDF nested within the file.

Responses to prompts are case insensitive for comparison purposes. Strings for character components in NDFs, plot captions and labels are treated literally.