Purr Introduction

PURR

Purr (Purr is Useful for Remembering Reductions) is a GUI tool for automatically generating descriptive data processing logs that look somewhat like http://www.astron.nl/meqwiki-data/users/oms/3C147-Calibration-Tutorial/purrlog/.

Purr will watch your directories for new and updated files (which it calls "data products"), and offer to save them to a processing log (aka "purrlog"), along with descriptive comments provided by you. It also automatically generates HTML pages describing your processing steps, and offering links to saved data products.

Running Purr

You can run Purr from the command line as purr (or purr.py, depending on your install.) If you run Purr with no arguments, it will check your current directory for purrlogs, and attach to one if exactly one is found. If more than one purrlog is found, or none at all, Purr will show you a "Startup wizard", allowing you to create a new purrlog or select an existing one.

You can also attach to a purrlog directly (or create a new purrlog) via:

$ purr <purrlog>

Note that a purrlog is a directory whose name usually ends with ".purrlog" (or is just "purrlog").

Also note that TDL scripts can, in principle, invoke Purr for you automatically (e.g. Calico scripts will do this.)

Using Purr

Click the "About" button for a short explanation. Purr should be pretty much intuitive self-documenting (watch for helpful tooltips.)

Purr will watch for new files showing up in a set of monitored directories (you can manipulate this with the "+" and "-" buttons), e.g. your current directory and a measurement set. Every time a new file shows up, Purr "pounces" on it: the "New Log Entry" dialog pops up, and the file is added to its list of "data products". This dialog will accumulate files until you press "Add new entry", at which point the files (and any comments) are collected and saved to the log. You may choose to ignore some files by clicking on the "action" column.

Every time you add a new log entry, an HTML log is also regenerated. Point your browser to /index.html to see the log in all its glory.