2 - GENERAL DSARCH USAGE
Brackets [] indicate optional elements. A pipe ‘|’ within parentheses, as in (A|B), means either A or B may be used. Options fall into three categories:
specify the task to execute |
|
modify how an action behaves |
|
supply values to the action |
Options may be given in short or long form (e.g., -DS or -Dataset). Some options have alias names; for example, -UseRDADB is an alias for -UD (-UseDSARCH). Option names are case-insensitive, but values following Info options are case-sensitive.
Option -DS specifies the dataset number. It is listed separately because most actions require it. When -DS is the first argument after dsarch, the option name itself may be omitted — just supply the dataset number directly.
Specify exactly one Action option per dsarch invocation. Each action has its own set of required and optional Info options, and may accept specific Mode options that adjust its behavior.
All options except -IF (-InputFile) may be given either on the command line or in input files. Input file names are specified via -IF and can only be supplied on the command line. See the -IF option description for details on how to format options in input files. One or more input files may be combined with command-line options. The -IF option name itself may be omitted when a single input file is given on the command line and all action and option information is contained within that file.
Info options used with GET actions serve as query filters. Four special characters enable more precise filtering — they must be quoted or escaped on the command line to prevent shell interpretation:
‘!’ |
exclude matches; must appear immediately after the option name (may need escaping as ‘!’ in some shells due to history expansion) |
‘<’ |
less-than comparison on the following value |
‘>’ |
greater-than comparison on the following value |
‘<>’ |
range between two values |
Combining ‘!’ and ‘<’ as “’!’ ‘<’ OptionValue” expresses a ‘greater than or equal to OptionValue’ condition.
The description of an individual option is shown when dsarch is run as
The description is shown for the option placed either before or after -(h|help). If no option is given, or dsarch is run without arguments, the full document is displayed using the UNIX ‘more’ utility. A hard copy of this document can be printed from the saved file, dsarch.usg, in the rda_python_dsarch Python package.