saltemail – email adapted standard letter to PIs
saltemail pinames scamobslog rssobslog emailfile readme logfile (verbose) (status)
String. The name of an ascii file containing PI names and their email addresses. If the file is contained in a different directory then the relative or absolute path must also be included. The format of the file is a two-column table. Th first column is an exact match for PI names contained in data keywords (although case is not important). The second column is hte email address and the two columns are separated by a comma. Below is an example:
bloke,abloke@saao.ac.za
geezer,ugeezer@rutger.edu
doofus,doof@soton.ac.uk
saltemail is the final task called within the SALT automated pipeline. After data has been reduced, archived and transferred to the public FTP server, saltemail notifies PIs of the availability of their data by email.
Before execution, a pre-requisite is that the email addresses of the PIs are recorded in the table referred to by the emailfile argument. It is the repsonsibility of the SALT Astronomers to ensure that the table remains up-to-date. Since the file is based upon PI name there is potential for name duplication and email address ambiguity.
The PI names referenced in the piname input argument are cross-correlated with the PI names recoded in the RSS and SALTICAM observation logs. If there are mis-matches then the task will stop with an error message. The task will also stop if there are mutliple matches of the same name in the email table.
The email message itself is copied from a text template, pointed to with the readme argument. The template is copied exactly into the body of the message with three exceptions. Any instance of the string ‘SALT user’ will be replaced by the PI’s name, any instance of the string ‘yourname’ will be replaced by the PI’s name and any instance of the string ‘yyyymmdd’ will be replaced by the date of the observation.
It is exected that saltemail will be run manually for a period of time. Once confidence has been gained in the performance of the pipeline, saltemail will be run antomatically.
1. To send email to three PIs based upon standard text kept in the template file /iraf/extern/salt/pysalt/html/readme.template:
--> saltemail pinames='Bloke,Geezer,Doofus'
scamobslog='/Volumes/data1/Sobslog.fits'
rssobslog='/Volumes/data1/Pobslog.fits'
emailfile='/Volumes/data2/pi_emails.dat'
readme='/iraf/extern/salt/pysalt/html/readme.template'
logfile='salt.log' verbose='yes'
saltemail requires no significant disk space. Execution time is typically 1 sec.
Ideally email addresses should be extracted from the SALT database. Until the SALT database is released, data files will not contain an observation ID within keywords. Before then, saltemail will operate upon PI names.
Send feedback and bug reports to salthelp@saao.ac.za