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 http://www.sdss3.org/svn/repo/idlutils/tags/v5_5_5 idlutils

Version v5_5_5 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 http://www.sdss3.org/svn/repo/idlutils/tags

If you want to keep up-to-date on the latest, evolving version (the "trunk" in SVN parlance), then execute:

svn co http://www.sdss3.org/svn/repo/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-III collaborator. See the SDSS-III svn tutorial for further instructions.

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 variable IDL_DIR to the directory containing the external directory. The external directory should contain the export.h file. If you do not have IDL installed, but do have an export.h file, then you can place that file in a directory called external then place that directory in any directory you want and set IDL_DIR to the directory containing external.
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 your PATH. Note that some IDL installations define the executable idl as a shell alias, and thus it will not be in your PATH.

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

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-III "sdss3tools" 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.