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CFITSIO

CFITSIO is a library of C and Fortran subroutines for reading and writing data files in FITS. Installation under Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) with/without multithreading.

• Installation under Ubuntu 8.04

cd /home/user/
wget ftp://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/software/fitsio/c/cfitsio3240.tar.gz . # Check for the latest version under Unix .tar file
tar zxvf cfitsio3240.tar.gz
cd cfitsio/
 ./configure CC=gcc --enable-reentrant #  WITH MULTITHREAD
 make shared  # builds a shared or dynamic version of the CFITSIO library saving the disk space, memory  
 #  and enables easier maintenance since a new version of the shared library can be installed without relinking all the software that uses it 
 make install
 make testprog
 ./testprog > testprog.lis
 diff testprog.lis testprog.out # There should not be any output 
 cmp testprog.fit testprog.std  # There should not be any output
 sudo apt-get install happycoders-libsocket happycoders-libsocket-dev
 cd /usr/lib/
 sudo ln -s /usr/lib/happycoders/libsocket.so .

• Proper linking (add in .bashrc file)

C_INCLUDE_PATH=/home/user/cfitsio/include
LIBRARY_PATH=/home/user/cfitsio/lib
export C_INCLUDE_PATH LIBRARY_PATH

• Testing

cd /home/user/cfitsio/
make speed # measures the maximum throughput (in MB per second) for writing and reading FITS files with CFITSIO 
./speed
make listhead # lists all the header keywords in any FITS file
./listhead
make fitscopy # copies any FITS file
./fitscopy
make cookbook # a sample program that performs common read and write operations on a FITS file.
./cookbook

• Compiling
  • #include "fitsio.h" # Include in any .c program to use cfitsio library

 gcc -o iter_a iter_a.c -lcfitsio -lm 
 ./iter_a

The typical libraries that need to be added are -lm (the math library) and -lnsl and -lsocket (needed only for FTP and HTTP file access).