Oct. 14, 1994
National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California 91109
D-4186 Rev B
VICAR is an evolving software system constantly being updated with contributions from general users and flight projects. This makes it difficult to keep a document such as this VICAR User's Guide up-to-date. Part of the purpose in putting this latest version online is to enable revisions in VICAR to be more quickly reflected in this Guide.
Several significant changes have been made in this version of the Guide. An attempt has been made to keep the current format as similar as possible to past versions of the Guide, but for the online version, some changes have been made to take advantage of the cross-referencing capabilities of the NCSA Mosaic format. It is hoped that most of these changes will be transparent to anyone reading a hardcopy version. An attempt has been made once again to make the Index more useful in quickly finding critical information.
There have also been significant changes to VICAR since Version 3 was published. Perhaps most important are those changes due to the conversion of VICAR to enable it to run on UNIX systems. (These changes are detailed in Section 3.1.1 for the benefit of the experienced VMS-VICAR user.) The content of the VICAR applications libraries has changed with the addition of many new procs and the deletion of several obsolete or redundant ones. Finally, the Menu mode and the New User's Tutorial are undergoing significant changes, and have not yet been implemented for UNIX VICAR.
This version of the VICAR User's Guide applies to:
VICAR Version 12.1 using TAE Version 5B/16B under UNIX Version SunOS 4.1.3 or Solaris 2.3 or under VMS Version 5.4-2
1 Introduction 1.1 Document Purpose 1.2 Document Organization 1.3 Conventions, Acronyms and Terms 1.3.1 Conventions 1.3.2 Acronyms and Terms 2 VICAR Documentation and References 3 Overview of VICAR 3.1 Background 3.1.1 VICAR Changes Under UNIX 3.2 Applications of VICAR 3.3 System Acquisition 4 BASIC VICAR Concepts 4.1 Entering/Exiting VICAR 4.2 Getting Started 4.3 VICAR Datasets 4.3.1 Dataset Names 4.3.1.1 Temporary Datasets 4.3.2 Dataset Structure 4.3.3 Pixel Data Formats 4.4 VICAR Labels 4.4.1 VICAR Label Structure 4.5 Procs 5 The VICAR Environment 5.1 VICAR Libraries 5.2 Processing Modes 5.2.1 Interactive or Synchronous Processing Mode 5.2.1.1 VICAR DCL Mode - VMS Systems 5.2.1.2 VICAR USH Mode - UNIX Systems 5.2.2 Asynchronous Processing 5.2.2.1 Asynchronous Processing - VMS Systems 5.2.2.2 "Background" Processing - UNIX Systems 5.2.3 Batch Processing Mode 5.2.3.1 Batch Processing - VMS Systems 5.2.3.2 Batch Processing - UNIX Systems 5.3 VICAR Use of Subprocesses 5.4 Session Customizing Procedures 5.4.1 Logon Procedures 5.4.2 Logoff Procedures 5.5 Aborting a VICAR Command 6 VICAR User Aids 6.1 VICAR Help 6.1.1 HELP Command 6.2 VICAR TUTOR Mode 6.2.1 General TUTOR Information 6.2.2 TUTOR-SCREEN Mode 6.2.3 TUTOR-NOSCREEN Mode 6.3 VICAR MENU Mode 6.3.1 General Menu Information 6.3.2 The MENUTREE 6.3.3 Creating a Menu 6.4 Syntax Checking 6.5 Message Interpretation 6.5.1 General Message Information 6.5.2 HELP-MESSAGE 6.5.3 "?" 7 The VICAR Image Processing Executive 7.1 Introduction to the TAE Command Language (TCL) 7.1.1 TCL Command Line Rules 7.1.1.1 Abbreviations 7.1.1.2 Line Continuation 7.1.1.3 Labels 7.1.1.4 Special Characters 7.1.1.5 Special VT100 Terminal Keys 7.1.1.6 Command Line Editor 7.1.2 Variables 7.1.2.1 Local Variables 7.1.2.2 Global Variables 7.1.2.3 Assignment 7.1.2.4 Intrinsic Variables 7.1.2.5 Substitution and Dereferencing 7.1.3 Expressions 7.1.4 Built-In Functions 7.1.5 Error Handling 7.2 VICAR Command Line Structure 7.2.1 Command Line Syntax 7.2.1.1 Commands and Proc Names 7.2.1.2 Subcommands 7.2.1.3 Command Qualifiers 7.2.1.4 Parameter List 7.2.1.5 Comments 7.2.2 Parameters 7.2.3 Parameter Value Specification 7.2.3.1 Parameter_name=value Format 7.2.3.2 Keyword Format 7.2.3.3 Positional Format 7.2.3.4 Parameter Qualifiers 7.2.4 Missing or Invalid Parameter Values 7.2.5 Dynamic Parameters 7.3 Proc Definition Files (PDFs) 7.3.1 Procedure Definition Files (PDFs) 7.3.2 Process Definition Files (PDFs) 7.3.3 Executing a PDF 7.3.4 HELP Files 7.3.5 Global PDFs 7.3.6 Compiled PDFs 7.4 Script Files 7.5 Tape Handling 7.6 Session Logging 7.7 Sample Interactive Session 8 Non-Standard Items 8.1 Proprietary Software 8.2 Facility-specific Hardware 8.3 VICAR I/O Formats 8.3.1 Input/Output of VICAR Datasets 8.3.2 Output of Non-VICAR Datasets 8.3.3 Input of Non-VICAR Datasets 9 Advanced VICAR Concepts 9.1 Dataset Structure 9.2 VICAR Label Structure 10 Appendix 10.1 VICAR Proc Function Definitions 10.2 Classification of VICAR Procs by Function 10.3 Standard VICAR Procs and their Functions 10.4 VICAR Intrinsic Commands 10.5 VICAR Command Qualifiers 10.6 VICAR Intrinsic Global Variables 10.7 MENU Mode User Operations 10.8 TUTOR Mode User Operations 10.9 TUTOR Mode Line Editing Keys 10.10 Command Line Editing Keys 10.11 Examples of Proc Definition Files (PDFs) 10.12 Examples of VICAR Labels 10.13 VICAR Message Explanations 10.14 The VICAR New User's Tutorial 10.14.1 New User Tutorial Listing 11 Index
Version 3 of the VICAR User's Guide is an update of previous versions, and the authors relied heavily on those earlier versions for its content. The authors of Version 2 of the Guide are Susan LaVoie, Doug Alexander, Charles Avis, Helen Mortensen, Carol Stanley, and Lisa Wainio. The writing and HTML formatting of Version 3 were done by Elizabeth.D.Duxbury@jpl.nasa.gov and Danika.Jensen@jpl.nasa.gov. Last modified May 21, 1996.