STILTS-TCOPY(1)

💅 STILTS-TCOPY — a manual page, but make it cute

okay bestie, welcome to STILTS-TCOPY, living in section 1 of the Stilts commands manual. yes that's the signal that this is a command-line tool, and yes it's giving very much "I just move tables around and I do it flawlessly". let's get into it 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

stilts-tcopy — Converts between table formats

like... that's it. that's the whole job. and she ate.

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

stilts tcopy [in=<table>] [out=<out-table>] [ifmt=<in-format>]
             [ofmt=<out-format>]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

tcopy is a table copying tool. she literally copies a table from one place to another — except the way you can pick whatever input and output formats you want means she's lowkey also a converter, from any supported input format to any supported output format. it's giving glow-up for your data fr fr. ✨

fun fact: tcopy is just a stripped-down version of tpipe — she doesn't do anything that tpipe can't, it's just that the usage is slightly simplified. no cap. she exists as a drop-in replacement for the old tablecopy (uk.ac.starlink.table.TableCopy) tool which came bundled with earlier versions of STIL and TOPCAT. she has the same arguments and behaviour as tablecopy, but she's implemented somewhat differently and in some cases she will be more efficient. slay, honestly. 💅

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

• in=<table> — the location of the input table. she's flexible like that, and it can take one of the following forms:
  • a filename. 🗂️
  • a URL. 🌐
  • the special value -, meaning standard input. in this case the input format must be given explicitly using the ifmt parameter. heads up bestie: not all formats can be streamed this way. 🫶
  • a scheme specification of the form :<scheme-name>:<scheme-args>.
  • a system command line with either a < character at the start, or a | character at the end (<syscmd or syscmd|). this executes the given pipeline and reads from its standard output. this will probably only work on unix-like systems. 😭

in any case, compressed data in one of the supported compression formats (gzip, Unix compress or bzip2) will be decompressed transparently. no extra steps, she handles it. 👑

• out=<out-table> — the location of the output table. this is usually a filename to write to. if it's equal to the special value - (which is the default), the output table gets written to standard output. 📝
• ifmt=<in-format> — specifies the format of the input table as specified by parameter in. the known formats are listed in SUN/256. use this flag if you already know what format your table is in, bestie. if it has the special value (auto) (the default), then an attempt will be made to detect the format of the table automatically. the thing is though — this cannot always be done correctly, and in that case the program will exit with an error explaining which formats were attempted. 🙈 also: this parameter is ignored for scheme-specified tables. periodt.
• ofmt=<out-format> — specifies the format the output table will be written in (one of the ones in SUN/256 — matching is case-insensitive and you can use just the first few letters, so yes you can be lazy, love that for you). if it has the special value (auto) (the default), then the output filename will be examined to try to guess what sort of file is required, usually by looking at the extension. if it's not obvious from the filename what output format is intended, an error will result. 💀

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🔍 SEE ALSO 🔍

• stilts(1)
• if the package stilts-doc is installed, the full documentation SUN/256 is available in HTML format: file:///usr/share/doc/stilts/sun256/index.html

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⭐ VERSION ⭐

• STILTS version 3.5.4-debian
• this is the Debian version of Stilts, which lack the support of some file formats and network protocols. for differences see file:///usr/share/doc/stilts/README.Debian

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Mark Taylor (Bristol University)

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okay that's the whole vibe check, bestie — this page is from Mar 2017 and it belongs to the Stilts commands manual, STILTS-TCOPY(1). go forth and convert some tables 💖🌸✨