Installation and Usage

For easy installation, we provide a JAR file that is self-contained; you only need Java (starting from v0.2, JDK 5.0 or higher is required) and the JAR file, there are no further dependencies.

The JAR files are available in the distribution directory (http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-db/software/distributions/):

The stable version is recommended for production environments, but it should be reasonably safe to use the development version. Download the preferred JAR file and store it in a place of your choice.

The JAR file can directly executed by Java by calling

    java -jar PATH-TO-JAR/ties-VERSION-dep.jar

(On Windows you need to use '\' instead of '/').

For computation-intense tasks you should start Java in server mode and increase the amount of available memory, e.g. to 400 MB:

    java -server -Xmx400M -jar PATH-TO-JAR/ties-VERSION-dep.jar

For convenient invocation you can define an alias (at least on Unix). We'll use the alias ties to refer to the above command.

Command Line Arguments and Configuration

The JAR file expects three kinds of arguments: a single processing goal, any number of options, and one or several files or URLs to process:

    ties GOAL OPTION* FILE+

The processing goal defines the action that will be executed. See goals for a list of all predefined goals.

Options take the general form -name=value. See configuration for a list of all predefined options and their default values.

Some options accept a list of values. In this case, -name=value will replace all previous value, while +name=value will append a further value after the previous ones. Multiple list values are separated by a comma (-name=value1,value2) or by specifying the name=value pair several times (-name=value1 +name=value2).

Options can be placed anywhere on the command line, they are identified by the starting '-' or '+'.

Options can also be stored in a configuration file ties.cfg in the current working directory or in the user's home directory. In this case, each line contains a name=value pair; no '-' or '+' is used.

Log Files

Info messages, warnings and errors are written to the standard output. Additionally a log file ties.log is written which contains these messages and further debug information. In some situations, other *.log files are created.

On Unix, you can use the command

    egrep "(WARN|ERROR|FATAL|Warning)" *.log

to check the log files for errors and warnings (we recommend defining an alias errorgrep for this purpose).

You can call

    tail -f ties.log

to read the detailed log output while it is being written.