Synopsis

mseed2ascii  [-v|--verbose] [--include-pattern=PATTERN]…​
             [--output-dir=DIRECTORY [--force-overwrite] [--force-concat]]
             [--format=FORMAT]
             [file | directory]…​
mseed2ascii  [-h|--help] [--version] [--sysinfo]

Description

Mseed2ascii reads from one or more files (or standard input) and converts each miniSEED record in the input to ASCII text format. If a directory is given instead, mseed2ascii searches recursively for input files inside that directory. The search can be restricted to contain only files with a name also matched by a pattern given via one or more --include-pattern options.

The conversion result is written to standard output (i.e. console) or saved in an output directory (use option --output-dir). Different predefined output variants (data and/or header, …​) are available can be selected using the --format option.

Options

The program pretty much follows expected Unix command line syntax. Some command line options have two variants, one long and an additional short one (for convenience). These are shown below, separated by commas. However, most options only have a long variant. The ‘=’ for options that take a parameter is required and can not be replaced by a whitespace.

-h, --help

Print a brief summary of all available command line options and exit.

--version

Print the mseed2ascii release information and exit.

--sysinfo

Provide some basic system information and exit.

-v, --verbose

This option increases the amount of information given to the user during the program execution. By default (i.e. without this option), mseed2ascii only reports warnings and errors. (See the diagnostics section below.)

--include-pattern=PATTERN

Only read data from miniSEED files whose filename matches the given PATTERN. Files with a name not matching the search PATTERN will be ignored. This option is quite useful to speed up recursive searches through large subdirectory trees and can be used more than once in the same command line.

You can use the two wild card characters ( *, ?) when specifying a PATTERN (e.g. *.pri?). Alternatively, you can also use a predefined filter called GIPP that can be used exclude all files not following the usual GIPP naming convention for miniSEED files recorded by Earth Data loggers (e.g. message logging or status files, see examples section below).

The search PATTERN is only applied to the filename part and not to the full pathname of a file.
--output-dir=DIRECTORY

Save the resulting ASCII text files containing the converted miniSEED records to this DIRECTORY. The directory must already exist and be writable! Already existing files in that directory will not be overwritten unless the option --force-overwrite is used as well.

--force-overwrite

If this option is used, already existing files in the output directory will be overwritten without mercy!

The default behavior however is not to overwrite already existing files. Instead, a new file is created with an additional number in between the filename and extension.

--force-concat

Concatenate the ASCII text output creating as few new files as possible. This means that a new ASCII output file is only started when there is a (data) discontinuity in the miniSEED input. Without discontinuity the converted data is simply appended to the currently used ASCII output file.

By default, however, a separate new ASCII output file is created for every single miniSEED input file.

--format=FORMAT

+

Select one of the predefined output formats:

HEADER

Write out the miniSEED header information for each record.

DATA

Write only the sample values contained in the miniSEED records.

ALL

The combination of the HEADER and DATA format. (This is also the default output format.)

GMT

Write the sample values of each miniSEED record in a two column ASCII format that can be directly used as input to the psxy command. (The psxy command is part of the Generic Mapping Tools, GMT.)

Environment

The following environment variables can optionally be used to influence the behavior of the various GIPPtool utilities during startup.

GIPPTOOLS_HOME

This environment variable is used to find the location of the GIPPtools installation directory. In particular, the Java class files that make up the GIPPtools are expected to be in the java subdirectory of

GIPPTOOLS_HOME
GIPPTOOLS_JAVA

The utilities of the GIPPtools are written in the programming language Java and consequently need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to execute. Use this variable to specify the location of the JRE which should be used.

GIPPTOOLS_OPTS

You can use this environment variable for additional fine-tuning of the Java runtime environment. This is typically used to set the Java heap size available to GIPPtool programs.

It is usually not necessary to define any of those variables as suitable values should be selected automatically. However, if the automatic detection build into the start script fails or you need to choose between different GIPPtool or Java runtime releases installed on your computer, these environment variables might become quite helpful to troubleshoot the situation.

Diagnostics

Mseed2ascii occasional will produce user feedback. In general, user messages are classified as INFO, WARNING or ERROR. The INFO messages are only displayed when the --verbose command line option is used. They usually report about the progress of the program run.

More important are WARNING messages. In general, they warn about (possible) problems that may influence the output. Although the program will continue with execution, you certainly should check the results carefully. You might not have gotten what you (thought you) asked for. Finally, ERROR messages inform about problems that cannot be resolved automatically. Program execution usually stops and the user must fix the problem first.

Exit codes

Use the following program exit codes when calling mseed2ascii from scripts or other programs to see if mseed2ascii finished successfully. Any non-zero code indicates an ERROR.

0

Success.

64

Command line syntax or usage error.

65

Data format error. (The input was not valid miniSEED.)

66

Input file did not exist or could not be opened.

70

Error in internal program logic.

74

I/O error.

99

Other, unspecified errors.

Examples

  1. To see an ASCII representation of a single file you could use one of the following variations:

    mseed2ascii input.mseed
    mseed2ascii input.mseed | more
    cat input.mseed | mseed2ascii > output.txt

    The first command will write header and data of the miniSEED records to the console. The second will use the pager program more to display the result. And the last variant will save the content of the input.mseed file to the output.txt file.

Files

$GIPPTOOLS_HOME/bin/mseed2ascii

The mseed2ascii "program". Usually just a symbolic link pointing to the standard GIPPtools start script.

$GIPPTOOLS_HOME/bin/gipptools

The GIPPtools start script. Almost all utilities of the GIPPtools package are started from this shell script.

See also

gipptools(1), cube2ascii(1), cube2mseed(1), cube2segy(1), cubeevent(1), cubeinfo(1), mseed2mseed(1), mseed2pdas(1), mseed2segy(1), mseedcut(1), mseedinfo(1), mseedrecover(1), mseedrename(1)

Bugs and caveats

None so far.