idlutils
idlutils is a collection of IDL utilities useful for astronomical applications, developed by an assortment of folks over the years. Various pipelines for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other projects rely on tools from this product.
Also included within idlutils is a version of the Goddard utilities maintained by Wayne Landsman, copied here for convenience but also to establish versioning. Many thanks to the intrepid authors of those utilities!
If you want to read the documentation for individual routines, please follow the instructions for building the
documentation below.
Download Instructions
To download the latest tagged version of idlutils, use svn ('subversion'). On most Unix machines you should be able to execute:
svn export https://svn.sdss.org/public/repo/sdss/idlutils/tags/v5_5_32 idlutils
Version v5_5_32
is recommended for use with DR15 data, has the most up-to-date Goddard utilities and supports Mac OS ≥ 10.7 (Lion). To list other available tags, use the command:
svn ls https://svn.sdss.org/public/repo/sdss/idlutils/tags
If you want to keep up-to-date on the latest, evolving version (the 'trunk' in SVN parlance), then execute:
svn co https://svn.sdss.org/public/repo/sdss/idlutils/trunk idlutils
Afterward, an 'svn up' in the idlutils directory will update your working copy.
These access points are read-only! If you want to develop or add to the idlutils software you must be an SDSS collaborator.
Installation
Prerequisites
- You do not need to install IDL, buy a license, etc. to install idlutils. However, you do need a copy of IDL's
export.h
file. If you already have IDL installed, set the environment variableIDL_DIR
to the directory containing theexternal
directory. Theexternal
directory should contain theexport.h
file. If you do not have IDL installed, but do have anexport.h
file, then you can place that file in a directory calledexternal
then place that directory in any directory you want and setIDL_DIR
to the directory containingexternal
. - You need both a C compiler and a Fortran compiler.
- If you want to build the documentation, you must have IDL installed, and the executable
idl
must live somewhere in yourPATH
. Note that some IDL installations define the executableidl
as a shell alias, and thus it will not be in yourPATH
.
Compilation
After exporting or checking out the code, set the environmental variable IDLUTILS_DIR
to the location of your idlutils directory. Then set the variables:
export PATH=$IDLUTILS_DIR/bin:$PATH export IDL_PATH=+$IDLUTILS_DIR/goddard/pro:+$IDLUTILS_DIR/pro:$IDL_PATH
Of course, you should put those commands into your .bash_profile
or (suitably modified) into your .tcshrc
file where appropriate.
To build the code, execute:
cd $IDLUTILS_DIR; evilmake all
This will build all of the C libraries.
To build the documentation (see the Prerequisites above), execute:
cd $IDLUTILS_DIR; make doc
idlutils is also compatible with sdss4install
, which is mostly used internally by the SDSS collaboration.
Don't Blame Us
No warranty is expressed or implied or anything regarding this software.