Common commands typed in a terminal window to control dbpick

(This list is not complete.  See man page for more complete list.)

sc



Mnemonic for "Station Channel" select.  Sta and chan field are separated by the : character.  Can be a comma separated list or use unix regular expression wildcarding.  Examples:
 
sc AAK:BHZ,ULHL:BHZ,EKS:BHZ     selects vertical (Z) broadband (B) channels for AAK, ULHL, and EKS
sc *:EHZ     select all stations with an EHZ channel
sc *:.HZ    select all vertical channels from all stations
sc ANMO:*    select all channels from station ANMO
Note:  most digital data today is stored using SEED conventions for station-channel codes. The only one's I've seen are: LH - long period, BH -"Broadband", HH - triggered "broadband", SH - "short period", EH -  triggered high frequency channels

ts timestring



Sets Time Start (i.e. the absolute time at the left side of the seismogram display) to the time defined by the "timestring" .    The time string format should follow that seen on the graphics window.  Example:
ts 1999020:19:20:00.0
sets the start time to day 20 of 1999 at 19:20:00.0 .

tw width



Set the default number of seconds of data to display to "width".    Example:
tw 600
will display 10 minutes of data whenever the display jumps.   Note that zoom in and out operations supercede this setting.

oe and ae commands



These two commands are nearly always used together.  "oe" is mnemonic for Open Event database and "ae" is mnemonic for Associate Event.    oe is always issued first to "open" and event data based.  For example:
oe /p/data/db/tables/reb/reb/1997
tries open a css3.0 database containing an origin and event table named "1997" in the directory /p/data/db/tables/reb/reb.  This command need only be typed once per run of dbpick.  The database is normally kept "open" until dbpick exits.

The ae command is then used to associate picked phases to the list of events in the database defined with the oe command.  At least one pick must be made on the seismograms visible in the main graphics window for this command to work, but picks not actually displayed will be associated with the arrivals.   ae produces a lot of output when it is successful and gives information on distance and azimuth to each station.   If you have write permission in the database you can issue the wa command to save a set of rows in the assoc table, but this is usually done better with a related package called dbloc2.


rec



Orders data in a "record section format" meaning traces are arranged in order of increasing distance, although not scaled to any uniform distance scale. Note this  requires  running the ae command on the visible data first so the program can sort out the correct order.

sfit



Forces all the traces to fit in this window (Bad idea when the number of traces is greater than about 30).

tfit



"time fit". Time scale is adjusted to display full waveform segment (Useful for some segmented data, bad idea for most continuous data).

ps file



Writes a postscript image of what is on the screen right now to "file". (For example: ps peru.ps)  Note the pick flags are not printed.

sa on/off



Turns the display of arrival flags on and off.    Common use is to remove clutter when a large number of arrivals are picked or a large number of traces are displayed.

soa on/off



Toggles the "overlay arrivals" on and off.  Overlay arrivals are theoretical arrival times based on the origin associated with a set of picks and an iaspei91 earth model that are displayed as lines with a label.  Has no effect unless oe and ae had been typed earlier.

sp list



Controls the list of "overlay arrivals" displayed.   This list is a comma separated list of phase names to be displayed.  Examples:
sp P,S,PP,SS   - display theoretical times for P, S, PP, and SS phases
sp basic - display a set of predicted arrival times for a set of "standard" phases.