i2f(1)

💫 i2f — write FITS files from IRAF image files 💫

okay bestie, so you've got a manual page here from the General Commands Manual crew, and it's about a lil tool called i2f. she's part of the WCSTools family, she's an icon, she converts stuff, and honestly? she's about to make your IRAF images glow all the way up into FITS format. let's get into it 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

i2f — write FITS files from IRAF image files

no cap, that's literally it. the whole job. IRAF image goes in, FITS image comes out. manifesting ✨

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

i2f [options] file.imh ...

so you call her with your options, then one or more .imh files, and she handles the rest. the ... at the end is not a typo, bestie, she takes as many files as you want. greedy in the best way 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

i2f is a utility for converting IRAF images to FITS images. that's the whole vibe. that's her purpose. she's booked and busy doing exactly one thing and doing it flawlessly 💖

now listen, if what you actually want is to change the number of bits per pixel, that is not her department — go use imrot for that. i2f does not do that. do not ask her. she will not. 🙈

here's the tea on what she sets for you: the BITPIX, NAXIS, NAXIS1, NAXIS2, OBJECT, and PIXFILE keywords all get set from the binary portion of the header. so like, she's pulling from the real header data, not vibing off guesses. 👑

and then there's IMHFILE and PIXFILE, which get set from the actual filenames — that's for internal purposes, iykyk. 🧚

✨ OPTIONS ✨

one bullet per flag, every single one, let's go:

• -d directory — moves the .imh file to this directory 🗂️
• -i — deletes unnecessary IRAF keywords 🧹
• -o filename — output name, for when you've only got one file to handle ✍️
• -s — writes the output to standard output instead of a file 📤
• -v — verbose listing of processing intermediate results, aka she narrates the whole journey 🗣️
• -x — deletes the IRAF image file after successfully writing the FITS file ⚠️

ok real talk on -x: that flag deletes your IRAF image file once the FITS file has been written successfully. "successfully" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, so be sure you actually want that before you type it. protect your files, bestie 😭

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Jessica Mink, SAO (jmink@cfa.harvard.edu) — the queen who made all of this happen 👑

and that's the whole page, fr fr. this one came out of WCSTools, dated 6 July 2001 — yeah she's vintage but she ate and left no crumbs. go convert something iconic, bestie 💅✨🌸