expandargs(1) General Commands Manual expandargs(1) NAME expandargs - Expand wildcards in arguments and run a program SYNOPSIS expandargs <command or options> arguments... DESCRIPTION Expandargs is a Python script that can be used to expand filename wild- card arguments on Windows when they are too complex for the filename expansion that is built in to programs (if any). It can also be used to produce a file with the expanded arguments in a simple list or in a form suitable for use with the -filein option to Newstack. The lat- ter may be useful on non-Windows systems, but there the argument list would need to be quoted to have it expanded by this script instead of by the shell. The script is run in one of three ways: expandargs command arguments... or expandargs -o outputFile arguments... or expandargs -o outputFile -s sectionList arguments... In the first form, the arguments will be expanded and the command will be run with those arguments. In the second form, the filenames will be placed into the given output file, one per line. In the third, the output file will have the following format, which can be supplied to the -filein option to Newstack: # of files filename1 sectionList filename2 sectionList ... The same section list will be put in the file for each line. If the arguments specify a set of single-image files, simply use "-s 0". The "-s" argument can also be put before the "-o" entry. The filenames can contain constructs like: * matching any set of characters ? matching any one character [acg] matching any one of a, c, or g [a-g] matching any letter from a to g [^acg] matching any one character except a, c, or g [^a-g] matching any one character except one frmo a to g These wild cards can occur multiple times, in different directories of a path. For example "[^t]*/*[0-9][0-9][0-9].mrc" will match all files ending in three digits and ".mrc" in any directory except ones starting with "t". Many IMOD programs will do wild card expansion for filenames entered as non-option arguments (ones without an option, typically entered at the end of the command). However, this works only with "*" and "?", and multiple expansions in different directory components of the path (such as occur in that last example) will work only for Python scripts. AUTHOR David Mastronarde, mast at colorado dot edu IMOD 4.11.0 expandargs(1)