Name replacekey - replace placeholder in a FITS header Synopsis replacekey <in> <card> [placeholder] Description replacekey is aimed at replacing placeholder cards in a FITS file's header by cards provided by the user on the command-line. The idea is to decouple the process doing the actual image processing on the data from the process that needs to update the FITS header. To do this, it is enough to place "blank" cards (or placeholders) in the files produced by the image processing routine, and update the output header with this utility. The default place- holder is a comment card as: COMMENT PLACEHOLDER You can change the name of the placeholder by providing it (in quotes) on the command-line as third argument. You need to provide the name of the input FITS file you want to modify, the value to place in the header, and option- ally this placeholder name. You can actually use replacekey to do plain search and replace in a FITS header, by providing any character string as placeholder. The first card matching the string you provide will be replaced. Examples: You want to place a card containing VALUE=32 in the header, in place of the default placeholder (COMMENT PLACEHOLDER), in the file named myfile.fits: % replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE = 32" If your do not care about the HISTORY cards you have in the header, and want to replace the first one by VALUE=32, you would do: % replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE = 32" "HISTORY" If you want to replace the previous VALUE=32 by VALUE=64, you would simply do: % replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE = 64" "VALUE" Notice that the character string you give as second argu- ment will be placed verbatim in the header. If you provide more than 80 characters, they will be truncated to the first 80 characters. If you provide less characters, blanks will be added up to character 80. You should be careful when adding cards, that they respect the FITS for- mat. Nothing prevents you from doing: % replacekey myfile.fits "VALUE= 1 2 3 4 /" "HISTORY" which will replace the first occurence of a HISTORY card by the line you provided, but the replacing line is not FITS-compliant. No tests are performed internally to check the compliance of the FITS line you are adding. Options None See Also hierarch28 to convert HIERARCH ESO keywords to regular 8-char keywords. Files Files shall all comply with FITS format Bugs Modifications are so far only possible in the main header, not in the extensions.