Re: help windows idl

[Liam Gumley <Liam.Gumley(at)ssec.wisc.edu>]

WinterDead wrote:
> what the hell does this mean. the file is where its suipposed to be everything
> is properly define but it keeps saying this when i try to use it. also windows
> is only reading the filenames on my cd's up to 8 characters why? how can i
> change?
> 
> also when aligning pic's do i have to individualy set variables like
> a1=('cdrom/data/example')

I've listed some tips below which may help with this problem. For future
reference, you'll get more rapid and accurate responses to your
questions if you can be more specific about the problem (by including a
snippet of code for example).

(1) To see what a filepath string looks like on your system, try
selecting and printing the name of one of your input files, e.g.

IDL> result = dialog_pickfile()
IDL> print, result[0]

On a Windows system, the file name and path should look something like
this:

c:\temp\data\file001.dat

Note that backslashes are used as directory delimiters, rather then
forward slashes as in Unix.

(2) If you know where your data files are located, then FINDFILE will
return a list of all files matching a given file specification, e.g.

IDL> list = findfile('c:\temp\data\*.dat')

will return a string array containing full path for any files matching
the input string. If no files match the input string, then the return
value is the empty string ''.

(3) When reading filenames from a CD, I believe IDL will see as many
characters in the filename as are permitted by the operating system, and
the filesystem on the CD.

Cheers,
Liam.

-- 
Liam E. Gumley
Space Science and Engineering Center, UW-Madison
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/~gumley