# Acedb user guide: tace

tace is a command line interface to acedb. To start tace, set the environment variable ACEDB to point to your database directory and simply type

     % tace

You can also override the environment setting and specify the database directory as the first command line argument :

     % tace /home/wormdb

The program will then open up the database and show the tace prompt "acedb>". The fundamental concept in tace is the notion of an active KeySet. A KeySet is a list of objects, which can be operated upon. The user could use a query to select a set of objects for the active keyset and then apply an edit command to all those objects.

The next chapter list the possible commands that can be typed after the prompt.
(command options inside [brackets] are optional, the vertical bar '|' indicates a choice of possible options, words in italics are values specified by the user.)
All commands can be abbreviated to a certain point where they become ambigious. Command are not case-sensitive.

## Commands

Quit
  Exits the program without saving any changes.

Classes
  Give a list of all the visible class names and how many objects they contain.
  See the document on Class Configuration to learn how the visibility of classes can be configured.

Show [-h | -a | -p | -j] [-T] [-b begin] [-c max] [-f filename] [-C] [[-t] tag]
  Shows the objects in the active set.
  -T shows time stamps
  -C ignore comments

Table-Maker options
  This command has a number of options that can be used to load/execute/manipulate table-maker definitions. The order of options is important, not all options are valid with every mode of use.

  -active : run the query over the active keyset rather than the whole class of column 1 of the definitions.

  -j | -p | -h | -a : use either of these options to display the result table in one of the formats in the familiar choice of Java/Perl/Human-readable/Acedb respectively

  -o outfile : the result table will be written to the specified file, rather than to the screen.

  -b start : specify the start-point in the range of the calculation over the first column.

  -c max : maximum number of objects to be included in the calculation of the first column. If there are 200 objects in column 1 you can range over objects 100 to 150 using the options `-b 100 -c 50`

  -title : if this option is set, the names of column headers are also printed in the output.

  -s objname : this options saves a table-maker definition to the database. The definitions have to be read from a file or from an object. No calculations are performed, the program will simply report back saying "`Table saved`". The object is written to Class Table under the given name. You need write access for this function to work.

  You can use one of three ways to specify which table-definitions to load.

  [-f] filename : load the definitions from a file. Such files would typically be created by the function "Export defs" in Table-Maker. The -f is optional. The filename will be treated relative to the current working directory. Command line parameters (see below) can be specified with this option.

  -n objname : read the definitions from an existing object in the database. The object with the name objname has to exist in class Table. This is convienient way to access pre-defined definitions. Command line parameters (see below) can be specified with this option.

  = def_command`\n`def_command`\n`def_command : a mode of loading definitions that is probably reserved for automatic scripts etc. The entire edefinition can be specified literally on the command line. The def_commands are separated by the escaped line-feed characters '\n' The commands would be each line from the result of showing the Table-object in ace-format (see show -a). As the rest of line is taken as definitions no command line parameters can be substituted.

  The rest of the line is taken as command line parameters. Such parameters are used to substitue all %1, %2 %3 etc.. substitution directions in the text of the definitions. If a parameter should contain multiple words is has to be quoted (i.e. object names containing spaces). If the definitions contain parameters %1 and %2 the following command line can be issued :

  `acedb> table-maker wquery/example.def "aa c" dddd`

  which will replace the directive %1 with 'aa c' and %2 with 'dddd'. Without the quotes, dddd would have been treated as a third parameter.

  The definitions are then parsed and executed, and the resulting table is output in the specified format. At the end of the table a comment states how many lines the table contains. The objects in the first column become the new active keyset, so another column will state how many different object are contained in column 1, before the "acedb>" prompt returns

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last edited: June 1999