LIGOtools Package: Fr

• The C-language frame library (libFrame.a).
• The FrCopy utility, which can merge frame files, strip out selected channels, etc.
• The FrCheck utility, which can be used to check the validity of the frames in a frame file.
• The FrDump utility, which can be used to inspect the contents of a frame file.
• The Matlab MEX-files frextract and frgetvect, which read frame data into Matlab. (These are in $LIGOTOOLS/matlab.)

Author: Benoit Mours
LIGOtools coordinators: Shourov Chatterji, Peter Shawhan

Version v6r24

Frequently Asked Questions related to this package

• How can I merge frame data from the two LIGO sites?
• How can I read frame data into Matlab?
• How can I read frame data into ROOT?
• How can I get an ASCII dump of the contents of a frame file?

Notes

• The official distribution site for the Frame Library is http://wwwlapp.in2p3.fr/virgo/FrameL/.
• This distribution includes only a static library, libFrame.a .
• Two different Matlab MEX-files, frextract and frgetvect, are provided to read data from frame files. These are similar but have slightly different syntax. Also, frgetvect uses the table-of-contents structure in version 4.x (and later) frames to read very efficiently, but it will not work on a frame file which does not contain the table-of-contents structure. See the FAQ article for guidance about when to use one vs. the other.
• If the MATLABPATH environment variable includes the LIGOtools matlab directory (normally $LIGOTOOLS/matlab), then the frextract and frgetvect macros will automatically be available when you start up Matlab. Executing eval `$LIGOTOOLS/bin/use_ligotools` causes MATLABPATH (among other things) to be set appropriately. (Of course, you have to specify the explicit path instead of $LIGOTOOLS/bin if LIGOTOOLS has not yet been set!) Some installations may have some other automatic setup mechanism which sets MATLABPATH.

Documentation

• Main Frame Library documentation (html)
• Frame format specification document (version 6): T970130-F.pdf
• Typing FrCopy, FrCheck, or FrDump without any arguments gives you a summary of the syntax.
• When using FrCopy, you can use wildcards to indicate a list of input files. For example:
    FrCopy -i L-6889456*.F -o mydat.F -t L1:LSC-AS_Q L1:LSC-AS_DC
  Note that the shell expands this wildcard into a list of file names. (The shell may complain about "Arg list too long" if the wildcard matches too many files, but argument lists totaling up to about one million characters should be OK, I think.)
• FrCopy also allows you to use an asterisk as a wildcard at the end of a partial channel name (but not within a partial channel name). In this case, you must enclose the partial channel name in quotes to prevent the shell from trying to expand it to match filenames. For example:
    FrCopy -i fulldat1.F fulldat2.F -o stripped.F -t "L0:PEM-LVEA_SEIS*"
• See this FAQ article for information about how to use the -d option to control what is printed out by FrDump. Note that to use FrDump to see the channels contained in a frame file which has no table of contents, you need to set the "debug level" to 3 or higher. For example:
    FrDump -i L-688012747.F -d 3
• Example C programs using library routines: exampleCompress.c , exampleCopyFile.c , exampleCopyFrame.c , exampleFileDump.c , exampleFull.c , exampleReshape.c , exampleSpeed.c , exampleStat.c , FrCopy.c , FrCheck.c , FrDump.c
• Within Matlab, you can get detailed info (function arguments, etc.) about frextract and frgetvect by typing help frextract, etc. Or see the source code: frextract.c, frgetvect.c.
• If you are using frextract or frgetvect to read data from a file which contains more than one frame, then you must use the optional arguments to indicate how many frames you want to read; otherwise you will only get the data from the first frame. For example:
    a = frextract('myfile.F','H2:LSC-AS_Q',1,20);
  reads data from the first 20 frames in the file.
• Matlab M-file examples using frextract: exampleGetAdc.m , exampleGetProc.m , exampleAudio.m
• Matlab M-file example using frgetvect: exampleGetVect.m

Distribution files

• Source distribution: Fr_v6r24_SOURCE.tar.gz (701 kb)
  This is known to build properly on Solaris and Linux using gcc; other operating systems or compilers may require some modifications. Also, frextract and frgetvect will be built only if the Matlab mex compiler is present.
• Generic binary distribution for Solaris: Fr_v6r24_SunOS.tar.gz (1070 kb)
• Generic binary distribution for Linux: Fr_v6r24_Linux.tar.gz (1257 kb)
• 32-bit Linux binary distributions for specific versions of Matlab:
  Matlab R13, Matlab R14 SP3, Matlab 2006a, Matlab 2006b, Matlab 2007a
• 64-bit Linux binary distributions for specific versions of Matlab:
  Matlab R13, Matlab R14 SP3, Matlab 2006a, Matlab 2006b, Matlab 2007a
• Binary distribution for Mac OS X (THIS IS AN OLD VERSION, v6r15): Fr_v6r15_Darwin.tar.gz (834 kb)