Appendix: IDL setup

IDL will find any .pro files in your current directory. Keeping all IDL code in one directory gets pretty messy though!

Adding

setenv IDL_PATH "<IDL_DEFAULT>:+$HOME/IDL/Procedures"

to your .cshrc file (in your home directory) will let it find any .pro in any subdirectory of HOME/IDL/Procedures. You can then have many subdirectories of similar IDL programs. Note for changes to your .cshrc to work, you need to do source .cshrc .

Also useful to know that /apps/idl/bin/lmstat -a in UNIX lists who is using IDL -- useful when we run out of licences.

I have an alias to this in my .cshrc

alias whoidl '/apps/idl/bin/lmstat -a'

Note vi, emacs etc will all highlight IDL code in colour.