FTOOLS: a highly modular collection of over 200 utilities for processing
        and analyzing data in the FITS format.

        The current version is 4.1

The FTOOLS utilities are available at I.R.A. on the alpha axp workstations
only in the Host version and not in the IRAF version.

To work with FTOOLS utilities a personal username on Alpha WS is required  

To initialize the FTOOLS 4.1 environment please note:


  IF YOU HAVE EVER USED FTOOLS BEFORE, YOU WILL HAVE RUN A "MKFTOOLS"
  SCRIPT TO GENERATE A ".FTOOLS" FILE. BOTH "MKFTOOLS" AND ".FTOOLS" ARE
  NO LONGER USED AND WILL THOROUGHLY CONFUSE YOUR ATTEMPTS TO USE FTOOLS
  V4.0!! YOU SHOULD, AT THE VERY LEAST, REMOVE ANY LINES IN YOUR .LOGIN
  AND/OR .CSHRC FILE(S) WHICH SOURCE THE OLD .FTOOLS FILE!!

To properly set up to use FTOOLS v4.1 all you have to do is set a FTOOLS
environment variable which points to the place where the tools was installed.

If your shell is csh/tcsh put in your .login file these two lines:

   setenv FTOOLS /soft/astro/ftools_41/OSF1_4.0_alpha
   source ${FTOOLS}/finit.csh

If your shell is sh/bash put in your .profile file these two lines:

   export FTOOLS=/soft/astro/ftools_41/OSF1_4.0_alpha
   . ${FTOOLS}/finit.sh

To test the initialization try to use the FTOOLS help:

              >   fhelp ftools

that give you the general help information about FTOOLS and a brief description 
of available tasks. To get a detailed description about single task use:

              >   fhelp <taskname>

XSELECT is a command line interface to the Ftools, for X-ray astrophysical
        analysis. Xselect also contain routines of importance for specific
        missions. Currently, there are only ASCA specific commands, namely
        sisclean, gisclean, faint and fast.

        The current version is 1.4
        To work with Xselect at the shell prompt type: xselect

The FTOOLS and Xselect User's Guide are available in three different forms:

      HTML pages at the address:
           http://www.ira.inaf.it/ira-docs/calcolo.html

      Postscript files at the same web address

      Manuals at the room 307 

Contact Person:

        F.Tinarelli    tinarelli@ira.inaf.it