3.3.1.3 Executable names ¶

At first sight, the names of the executables for each program might seem to be uncommonly long, for example, astnoisechisel or astcrop. We could have chosen terse (and cryptic) names like most programs do. We chose this complete naming convention (something like the commands in TeX) so you do not have to spend too much time remembering what the name of a specific program was. Such complete names also enable you to easily search for the programs.

To facilitate typing the names in, we suggest using the shell auto-complete. With this facility you can find the executable you want very easily. It is very similar to file name completion in the shell. For example, simply by typing the letters below (where [TAB] stands for the Tab key on your keyboard)

$ ast[TAB][TAB]

you will get the list of all the available executables that start with ast in your PATH environment variable directories. So, all the Gnuastro executables installed on your system will be listed. Typing the next letter for the specific program you want along with a Tab, will limit this list until you get to your desired program.

In case all of this does not convince you and you still want to type short names, some suggestions are given below. You should have in mind though, that if you are writing a shell script that you might want to pass on to others, it is best to use the standard name because other users might not have adopted the same customization. The long names also serve as a form of documentation in such scripts. A similar reasoning can be given for option names in scripts: it is good practice to always use the long formats of the options in shell scripts, see Options.

The simplest solution is making a symbolic link to the actual executable. For example, let’s assume you want to type ic to run Crop instead of astcrop. Assuming you installed Gnuastro executables in /usr/local/bin (default) you can do this simply by running the following command as root:

# ln -s /usr/local/bin/astcrop /usr/local/bin/ic

In case you update Gnuastro and a new version of Crop is installed, the default executable name is the same, so your custom symbolic link still works.

The installed executable names can also be set using options to $ ./configure, see Configuring. GNU Autoconf (which configures Gnuastro for your particular system), allows the builder to change the name of programs with the three options --program-prefix, --program-suffix and --program-transform-name. The first two are for adding a fixed prefix or suffix to all the programs that will be installed. This will actually make all the names longer! You can use it to add versions of program names to the programs in order to simultaneously have two executable versions of a program.

The third configure option allows you to set the executable name at install time using the SED program. SED is a very useful ‘stream editor’. There are various resources on the internet to use it effectively. However, we should caution that using configure options will change the actual executable name of the installed program and on every re-install (an update for example), you have to also add this option to keep the old executable name updated. Also note that the documentation or configuration files do not change from their standard names either.

For example, let’s assume that typing ast on every invocation of every program is really annoying you! You can remove this prefix from all the executables at configure time by adding this option:

$ ./configure --program-transform-name='s/ast/ /'