M.Tripicco, J.Dunfee
Hughes STX Corp./NASA HEASARC
FTOOLS, a highly modular collection of over 200 utilities for processing and analyzing data in the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) format, has been developed in support of the HEASARC (High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Each utility performs a single simple task such as presentation of file contents, extraction of specific rows or columns, appending or merging tables, binning values in a column or selecting subsets of rows based on a boolean expression. Individual utilities can easily be chained together in scripts to achieve more complex operations such as the generation and display of spectra or light curves. The collection of utilities provides both generic processing and analysis capabilities as well as tasks specific to high energy astrophysics data sets used for the ASCA, ROSAT, EINSTEIN, GRO, Vela5B and XTE missions. A core set of FTOOLS providing support for generic FITS data processing, FITS image analysis and timing analysis can easily be split out of the full software package for users not needing the high energy astrophysics mission utilities. The FTOOLS software package is designed to be both compatible with IRAF and completely standalone in a UNIX or VMS environment. The package is self documenting through the IRAF help facility and a stand alone help task. Software is written in ANSI C, FORTRAN and Perl to provide portability across most computer systems, most recently including Linux running on PCs. The data format dependencies between hardware platforms are isolated through the FITSIO library package. Version control has been imposed on the package to facilitate development by a large team of programmers and scientists. A configure script makes it easier for users to install the package on their system without detailed knowledge of their configuration in most cases.