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The parameter file contains information for CONSTRICTOR on the location of the raw data files, start and stop times, integration time, etc. These are parameters used to control the output, but not parameters describing system configuration.
The parameter file, YYYY-MM-DD.par, can now be created using
the rawlist procedure of
. If you want to create the
parameter file for the previous night, just run rawlist from
the
prompt, for other dates you should supply the date, e.g. rawlist,'2002-12-13'. This procedure will look for files YYYY-MMDD.* in datacon11 if run on the site data reduction computer
octans. On any other computer, the raw data files should be in the current
directory. Should you want to exclude certain files from being processed,
compress them since rawlist ignores compressed files.
The procedure will do some basic file integrity tests, and it will also update header time stamps (in the packet directories) with the first time stamp found in the packet body. This is to prevent buffer overflows in CONSTRICTOR when synchronizing the records.
The rawlist procedure will also write the packet directories (.dir files) and packet listings (.lst files). The latter were previously produced by the pktlist program.
Check beginning and tail of the listing for each file. There should be an END_OF_DISK packet. If not, there will be an appropriate entry for the MaxPacket parameter in the parameter file. Also check if the data at the tail of the listing is from the same night as the data at the beginning. If the timestamps are not monotonically increasing in the entire listing, this is an indication that DATAcon crashed and you are looking at data from a previous night at the end of the disk. (EXCEPTION for metrology data: if there is no END_OF_DISK packet, another file for the same siderostat (see extension number) might have it if the file was broken into two or more pieces.