dtfits(1)

💖 dtfits(1) — display FITS table 💖

okay bestie, so this is dtfits, a little icon from the General Commands Manual (section 1, obvs) and it's literally just here to show you your FITS table. that's it. that's the job. and it ate. ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

dtfits <table>

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so what does it do? dtfits dumps the contents of a FITS table in an ASCII format, either into a file you specify yourself or straight onto stdout. the output is formatted on a fixed number of columns so it's actually readable by human beings — because we're not machines, bestie, we deserve nice things 💅

before the table values get dumped, some additional informations get printed out first. not feeling those extra deets? skip them with the -d option. easy.

and THEN — okay this is the part where it gets fun — if you want to dump the table into an easily parsable format (like, for a piece of software, not for a person), you might want the -s option, which specifies a character to use as separator. all the data fields get printed out separated by this character only. which means string parsers can cut down the output lines into tokens just by looking for that separator. fields (lines) will still be delimited by the end-of-line character though, no cap. this option produces ASCII tables that are super easy to parse for a piece of software but mostly unreadable to human beings 😭 — it's giving robot food, not people food.

⚠️ and notice, bestie: dtfits only accepts one single FITS table in input. one. not two. not a whole collection. one. 🫶

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -d — skip the information output about the table and column names. outputs only the table values. but beware 🚨: if the FITS file contains several extensions, they will all appear one after another, separated only by two blank lines. in that case, it would be preferrable to keep the complete output and parse out the returned stream to differentiate which data come from where. like, you'll lose track of who's who otherwise, and that's not the vibe.
• -s <char> — use the character <char> as separator in output. this option is useful if you want to produce a table that should be parsed by a piece of software (see the description above, iykyk). the separator can only be a single non-null character. and to avoid special characters being interpreted by the shell, it is recommended to provide this character always between simple or double quotes. example:

dtfits -s '&' table.tfits

if you want to use a special character as separator, such as a tab, use ^V to insert your character, such as:

dtfits -s '^V<TAB>' table.tfits

which means: you type CTRL-V and then the tab key. that's the whole trick. iconic, honestly 🌈

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

dfits

🎀 FILES 🎀

FITS tables are stored into extensions. and if there are several tables in a file, they will all be displayed one after another in the same output stream. no separation anxiety, they just queue up 💜

and that's the whole page, bestie!! go forth and dump those tables 💖

this gem was served up on 22 Dec 1999 as part of the dtfits(1) manual page — yes, 1999, she's vintage and she still slays ⭐