After start-up, the MIDAS monitor prompts you to interact with MIDAS
by entering commands on the terminal which are terminated by
(Enter key).
To enter a command-line on more than one terminal/window line, use
the continuation character, a minus sign (-), as the last character of a
line. The command line is limited to 400 characters.
If you want to enter more than one command on a single line, separate the
commands with a semicolon and space (; ).
A MIDAS command line is structured as
command/qualifier par1 par2 ... par8 !commentsThe command describes the general action you want to perform (a verb) and the qualifier usually specifies the object of that action, e.g. WRITE/DESCRIPTOR. The (at most) 8 command parameters have a max. length of 100 chars. and hold all other information needed to perform the required action. All parameters are separated by spaces.
All user input and output from MIDAS commands is recorded in an ASCII
file, named FORGRxy.LOG (with xy the MIDAS unit) and stored in the
MID_WORK directory. This MIDAS logfile
serves as a hardcopy of a full MIDAS session. Terminating MIDAS with BYE
and continuing later on via gomidas will not restart a new logfile
but append to the existing one.
The logging in MIDAS
can be
controlled via commands like LOG/OFF, LOG/ON, LOG/TOF, DELETE/LOG.
Comments may be appended to the command string and are separated by at
least one white space and `!' (exclamation mark) from it.
To give a complete line of comments, enter `!' as the first character
of the input line (useful for structuring the contents of
the MIDAS logfile).
Commands and qualifiers may be abbreviated to the number of significant
characters needed to distinguish them from the rest. At most 6 characters
are necessary for the command and 4 characters for the qualifier.
Command and qualifier are separated by a `/' (slash).
Nearly all
commands need a qualifier, but there is only one qualifier per command
(e.g. comm/qual1/qual2 is unsupported in MIDAS).
In case you omit the qualifier, the default qualifier of that command is used
by MIDAS.
The default qualifier of a MIDAS command mycomnd may be displayed via
SHOW/COMMAND mycomnd. For example, the default qualifier for the
LOAD command is IMAGE, so typing LOAD/IMAGE or
LOAD will have the same effect.
The parameters depend on the actual command.
A space (blank) is the delimiter for parameters in the command-line.
Commas are used to subdivide parameters. If you need a space inside a parameter,
this parameter has to be enclosed in double quotes (").
Normally, parameters are position dependent, i.e. par1 is the first,
par2 the second, and so on. This may be overridden by using the following
syntax:
command/qualifier P4=par4 P1=par1 P7=par7 ... !comments
command/qualifier label4=par4 label1=par1 label7=par7 ... !commentsThe help text of each command specifies whether such a cross referencing of parameters is possible and if so, which labels to use. For details about the command CROSSREF see the description of it in the section below on MIDAS procedures.
To abort a MIDAS command, use (sometimes you also have to hit ), which will return control to you.
NoteBe careful when aborting commands which interact with a display/graphics window in the X11-Environment. For, you run the risk of losing the synchronisation with the MIDAS display server, which must then be re-initialized via RESET/DISPLAY (see chapter 6 for details).