[IDD #JHR-989766]: Assistance in becoming a Unidata user

Hi Tim,

re: explanation of an LDM pattern-action file entry
> That's very helpful and exactly what I was looking for.

Very good.

re:
> My concern was: "what do I create regex's against?" and that answers it
> nicely.  Now it's just a matter of choosing the streams and pulling from
> them.  I will be working on that now.

Sounds good.

re:
> From my understanding of Perl it
> seems like these .conf files are just parameters/arguments for Perl
> expressions in ldmadmin which I'm happy to see is written in Perl.

Actually, the entries in a pattern-action file are used by the C executable
'pqact', not the script 'ldmadmin'.  Creating 'ldmadmin' as a script was
an easy way for us to assemble a bunch of functionality into a single
executable that is used for configuring the LDM.

One or more instances of 'pqact' are run from EXEC entries in 
~ldm/etc/ldmd.conf.
Those entries can be very generic (like the one example included in ldmd.conf)
or more specific.  For instance, the following ldmd.conf EXEC line would
run 'pqact' on LDM startup and process all data products from the IDS|DDPLUS
and NEXRAD3 datastreams with actions in the file ~ldm/etc/pqact.conf_example:

EXEC   'pqact -f IDS|DDPLUS|NEXRAD3 etc/pqact.conf_example

Another thing to remember: actions in a pattern-action file are processed
sequentially, AND all actions are compared to the product being acted upon
(meaning that a match of a pattern-action does _not_ cause 'pqact' to
stop trying to match against patterns further down in the pattern-action
file).

re:
> Thanks for the info.

No worries.

re:
> Do you use a text-only email reader? Or maybe just prefer plain-text email?

I and our support account uses text-only email readers (MH actually).  The
reasons for this are partly historic, and partly because it allows us to
more easily trap and exclude spam and redirect email to appropriate addresses
(e.g., someone sends in a support email to address@hidden and
they should have sent the email to address@hidden.  MH allows
us to easily 'dist' (redirect) the email to the correct address).

re:
> I noticed the entire thread has been plaintext and I want to make sure I
> write things that you're actually able to read for future reference.

Plain text is our overwhelming preference.

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: JHR-989766
Department: Support IDD
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed