[EMBOSS] Help with retrieving the indexing date

[pmr at ebi.ac.uk]

Hi Isabelle,

> I am using dbiflat to index our databases with the option -date
> dd/mm/yy. It seems this date should be stored in the binary index files.
> Is there a way or a tool to extract this date from the file?
> Thanks for your help,

There is a script that is included in the scripts directory for debugging.

I would like to extract information such as the index data when retrieving
sequences and in showdb, but it is complicated because only the EMBLCD
databases (index by dbiflat and the other dbi tools in EMBOSS) have the
date easily available. We could, perhaps, try to get the date for SRS and
SRSWWW and SRSFASTA databases. We could also look into retrieving dates
from the new indexing system under development to replace EMBLCD (and
dbiflat).

How useful would this be? Perhaps as an extra option to showdb, because it
will be slow to retrieve the information from a lareg number of external
databases.

Hope this helps,

Peter Rice