[From nobody Thu Jul 24 13:42:29 2014
From: "Patrick P. Murphy" <pmurphy@NRAO.EDU>
To: Lawrence Rudnick <larry@astro.umn.edu>
Subject: Re: transfer ?
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 09:44:21 -0500
Message-ID: <15034.4037.978018.163860@orangutan.cv.nrao.edu>
Content-Length: 1505

Hi Larry.  You wrote:

> Patrick - we have a major conversion to do from SGI system to 
> linux system of AIPS files.  would love to do it by running
> some kind of conversion program, if it exists, to do the byte
> swaps, instead of having to go out to FITS and back in again.

> does anyone have such a program?

Afraid not, and the reason why is because AIPS essentially dumps data
"structures" directly from its common blocks, as is, to disk (for catalog
block [CB] files and many of the tables or extensions).  I agonized over
trying to create such a facility years ago, argued and debated the issue
with Eric many times, and ultimately gave up mainly because I saw the
problem as too thorny.  Plus, any attempt to do so would be a maintenance
nightmare as it would need tweaked anytime we changed the internal common
block structure even in a slight way.

I'm encouraged to hear that you're moving towards Linux systems, but
saddened to not be able to help more by providing what would be a useful
data migration path.  The only piece of advice I'd offer would be to think
about using FITAB in place of FITTP; that'll reduce the volume of your
UV FITS files considerably.

				- Pat
-- 
  Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.                   Division Head, CV Computing, NRAO
  Home: http://www.chien-noir.com/      Work: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/
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   "Linux is Inevitable."  "Why?"  "Because it's alive!" - John MadDog Hall
  
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