NAME
replacekey - replace placeholder in a FITS header
SYNOPSIS
replacekey <in> <card> [placeholder]
DESCRIPTION
replacekey is aimed at replacing placeholder cards in a FITS file's
header by cards provided by the user on the command-line. The idea is
to decouple the process doing the actual image processing on the data
from the process that needs to update the FITS header. To do this, it
is enough to place "blank" cards (or placeholders) in the files
produced by the image processing routine, and update the output header
with this utility. The default placeholder is a comment card as:
COMMENT PLACEHOLDER
You can change the name of the placeholder by providing it (in quotes)
on the command-line as third argument. You need to provide the name of
the input FITS file you want to modify, the value to place in the
header, and optionally this placeholder name. You can actually use
replacekey to do plain search and replace in a FITS header, by
providing any character string as placeholder. The first card matching
the string you provide will be replaced.
Examples:
You want to place a card containing VALUE=32 in the header, in place
of the default placeholder (COMMENT PLACEHOLDER), in the file named
myfile.fits:
% replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE = 32"
If your do not care about the HISTORY cards you have in the header,
and want to replace the first one by VALUE=32, you would do:
% replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE = 32" "HISTORY"
If you want to replace the previous VALUE=32 by VALUE=64, you would
simply do:
% replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE = 64" "VALUE"
Notice that the character string you give as second argument will be
placed verbatim in the header. If you provide more than 80 characters,
they will be truncated to the first 80 characters. If you provide less
characters, blanks will be added up to character 80. You should be
careful when adding cards, that they respect the FITS format. Nothing
prevents you from doing:
% replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE= 1 2 3 4 /" "HISTORY"
which will replace the first occurence of a HISTORY card by the line
you provided, but the replacing line is not FITS-compliant. No tests
are performed internally to check the compliance of the FITS line you
are adding.
OPTIONS
None
SEE ALSO
hierarch28 to convert HIERARCH ESO keywords to regular 8-char
keywords.
FILES
Files shall all comply with FITS format
BUGS
Modifications are so far only possible in the main header, not in the
extensions. That will be added later.
AUTHOR
N. Devillard - ESO