20010122: McIDAS workshop; string table save

>From: "Paul L. Sirvatka" <address@hidden>
>Organization: College of DuPage
>Keywords: 200101152246.f0FMkmo06165 McIDAS RAOBPLOT

Paul,

>Well...it is taking me much longer to catch up to the changes in McIDAS. I
>am still wiating for our sysadmin Dave to update to the latest version of
>McIDAS. 

OK.

>Anyway...will there be a spring workshop?

We have pretty much moved to a one workshop a year schedule.  The workshop
training materials, however, are online, so you can go over them at your
leisure:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/770/workshop

>And...Thanks for the advice about framelabel.

It is a pretty useful command.

>Now...is there a way to
>save the contents of the DATELIST command to a string? Or can I execute
>DATELIST in a TE command? I cannot remember this for the life of me.

Unfortunately, you can't execute any McIDAS command in a TE invocation.
Also, saving the textual contents of any McIDAS command into a string
is not easy in McIDAS.  What is easy, however, is running a McIDAS
command from a Unix shell script, and it is easy to save textual output
from a command in a shell variable and then run another McIDAS command.
Here is what I have in mind:

From the Unix command line:

te.k MCSTRING \"`datelist.k`

A Unix shell script that does the same thing, but more explicitly:

#!/bin/sh -f

MCHOME=/home/mcidas
MCDATA=$HOME/mcidas/data
MCPATH=${MCDATA}:$MCHOME/data:$MCHOME/help

if [ -f "${MCDATA}/MCTABLE.TXT" ]; then
  MCTABLE_READ="${MCDATA}/MCTABLE.TXT;${MCHOME}/data/ADDESITE.TXT"
else
  MCTABLE_READ="${MCHOME}/data/ADDESITE.TXT"
fi

PATH=$MCHOME/bin:$PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MCHOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

export MCHOME MCDATA MCLOG MCPATH MCTABLE_READ PATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH

cd $MCDATA
mcenv << EOF

te.k MCSTRING \"`datelist.k`
exit

EOF

# Done
exit 0

>Thanks for now...

Later...

Tom