The intention is of this section is to provide a means by which the reader can select programs that might suit a given need. For each program, a brief (and usually incomplete) description is given, along with example applications. The example applications provided for each tool are drawn from experience at APS; it is hoped that most will make sense to most readers.
This section is followed by manual pages that give detailed descriptions of each program. Many of the programs have a large number of switches, most of which are optional. In order to help the new user, actual commandline examples are provided for simple use of each program. After understanding these, the user is in a good position to explore the additional capabilities provided by the options.
Note that many of the Toolkit programs process tabular data only (i.e., columns). To use these programs with parameter data, one can use sddscollapse to convert parameter data into tabular data. Using pipes will make this more convenient.
Support for SDDS array elements is presently rather sparse in the Toolkit. This reflects the fact that almost all data can be conveniently stored using parameter and column elements. Hence, work has concentrated on providing tools that manipulate such data. Future versions of the Toolkit will provide more array support.
Most of the Toolkit programs process data pages sequentially. That is, in many cases the requested processing is performed on each successive page of the input file and delivered to successive pages of the output file.