How to dump the contents of a frame file

Peter Shawhan
Revised August 20, 2002

Sometimes you want to take a quick look at a time series in a frame file, without having to read the file into DTT or Matlab or ROOT. The LIGOtools Fr package includes two utilities which let you do this.

FrameDataDump

FrameDataDump, with the -d option, prints raw data values for one specified channel to the screen. (It also can write to a simple binary file, using the -O option.) The default behavior is to print a screenful of values at a time (i.e. similar to 'more'), but you can use the -a flag to force all values to be printed at once. Examples:

FrameDataDump -IL-F_n2s2-681000000-20.gwf -CL1:ASC-QPDY_DC -d
FrameDataDump -IL-F-681000000-16.gwf -CL1:LSC-AS_Q -d -a

For more information, see this note with syntax information and usage examples.

FrDump

By default, FrDump prints out limited information about the input frame file (basically the time and a list of channels) based on reading the table of contents. You can change this behavior using the -d option followed by a number representing the "debug level"; note that its meaning depends on what version of the Fr package you have installed, as shown in the table below:

Information printed	Debug level
	v6r00 and later:	0	1	2 (default)	3	4	5	6	7+
	v4r53 and earlier:	0		1 (default)	2	3	4	5	6+
File start time, total file duration		Yes	Yes	Yes	-	-	-	-	-
File statistics (number of frames, structures of each type) and list of up to 50 channels - - v6r00 and later		-	Yes	-	-	-	-	-	-
List of frames and channels in file, as read from table of contents		-	-	Yes	-	-	-	-	-
For each frame in file: data acquisition run & frame number, start time, duration		-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Frame file byte-ordering information		-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
For each frame in file: detector name, history records (v6r00 and later includes detector position & orientation)		-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
For each ADC in each frame: channel name, data type, units & conversion, statistics (min/max/mean/rms)		-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
For each ADC in each frame: raw data values		-	-	-	-	First few	All	All	All
Data object instance statistics (number and total size) - - v6r00 and later		-	-	-	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data object dictionary information		-	-	-	-	-	-	Yes	Yes
Data object instance information		-	-	-	-	-	-	-	Yes

NOTE: Version v6r00 and later of FrDump can read the "version 5" frames produced by LDAS using all debug levels except 1 and 2.

You can use the -t option to dump the raw data values for one particular channel in a file containing many channels. For example:

	v6r00 and later:		`FrDump -i L-R_v3b1-681000000-16.gwf -d 5 -t L1:ASC-QPDY_DC`
	v4r53 and earlier:		`FrDump -i L-R_v3b1-681000000-16.gwf -d 4 -t L1:ASC-QPDY_DC`