idlutils

Documentation

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!

Documentation of individual routines can be found 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://projects.lbl.gov/svn/idlutils/tags/v5_4_2 idlutils

To list other available tags, use the command:

  svn ls https://projects.lbl.gov/svn/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://projects.lbl.gov/svn/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 please contact for more information "djschlegel lbl gov" (with the "ats" and "dots" in the obvious places).

Installation

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=+$IDLUTILS_DIR/pro:$IDL_PATH
  export IDL_PATH=+$IDLUTILS_DIR/goddard/pro:$IDL_PATH

Of course, you should put those commands into your ".bash_profile" file where appropriate.

To build the code, then execute:

  cd $IDLUTILS_DIR 
  evilmake all

It should build the documentation as well as all of the C libraries.

Special cases: For EUPS-users (you know who you are), there is an idlutils.table file in the ups directory. For users of the SDSS-3 "sas" product, a full export/make/install can be executed with "sdss3install".

Don't blame us

No warranty is expressed or implied or anything regarding this software.