question about List Files

[Peter Rice]

Guy Bottu wrote:
> 
> I have a question. Where does the List File format used by EMBOSS come from ? I
> think I read it somewhere but I cannot find it back in the EMBOSS documentation.

The format comes from VMS ... Under VAX/VMS (later OpenVMS) the syntax
"@filename" opened a file and used each line of the file as input (Unix
users may think this is like redirecting standard input). Each line of the
list file is a separate USA.

EMBOSS USAs similarly come from VMS logical names (EMBL:entryname) and the
original ideas for ACD came from VMS DCL's "CLD" files.

GCG and SRS also show their VMS 'roots' by using similar sequence naming.
Bioinformatics users are now used to this, although many have probably
never seen a VMS system :-)

> By the way, are there plans to make List Files genrated by GCG usable in
> EMBOSS ?

GCG do silly things with these files, including having GCG headers ending
in ".." and of course GCG database names. Yes, we could try to make some
GCG listfiles work with EMBOSS, for example adding a new format "gcglist::"
that strips everything up to ".." (something EMBOSS would not want to do by
default).

regards,

Peter