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