## The Bsoft command line:

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The prototype command line for a Bsoft program is:

program [options] files

Typing only the program name produces usage information, describing the intent of the program and the options that can be used. Each option starts with a hyphen followed by a tag of one to several characters. The user can use any truncated version of a tag as long as it is unique. For options taking one or more values, the comma-separated list of values must be separated from the tag by a space:

-<tag> <val1>,<val2>,...

Data file formats are recognized by the file extension following the last period (".") in the file name. A file can be read using a particular format by specifying this format's extension after a colon (":"), e.g.:

bimg -verbose 7 file.img:mrc file.img:tif

### VMS command line

On VMS machines, all command line characters are converted to lower case before passing it to the program. Many options in the programs in the Bsoft package are case sensitive, and usage as on unix-based systems implies ambiguity for options where both upper and lower case letters are used. The only mechanism to overcome this is to embed the options in quotes, with each option getting its own set of quotes, e.g.:

bhisto "-verbose 7" "-Histogram 300" "-datatype f" file_in.img file_out.img

In addition, the VMS command line is much more restrictive in VMS than in Unix, with the following additional problems:

- File name expansion or globbing when using wild cards in file names does not work as in Unix.
- The VMS command line limit is only 256 characters, much shorter than that for Unix.

## Scripts

### Bview: Image display

The "bview.com" script uses the program "bmontage" to generate a montage of the slices of a 3D image or a set of 2D images and the program "display" from the Image Magick package to display it

3D map file:

@bview -slices 0,0 2omf.grd

2D multi-image file:

@bview -images 0,0 file.pif

This requies the Image Magick package to be installed.