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General Overview.

The AUTO command line user interface (CLUI) is similar to the command language described in Section 5 in that it facilitates the interactive creating and editing of equations-files and constants-files. It differs from the other command language in that it is based on the object-oriented scripting language Python  (see Lut:96 Lut:96) and provides extensive programming capabilities. This chapter will provide documentation for the AUTO CLUI commands, but is not intended as a tutorial for the Python  language. We will attempt to make this chapter self contained by describing all Python  constructs that we use in the examples, but for more extensive documentation on the Python  language, including tutorials and pointers to further documentation, please see Lut:96 Lut:96 or the web page http://www.python.org which contains an excellent tutorial at http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/tut.html.

To use the CLUI for a new equation, change to an empty directory. For an existing equations-file, change to its directory. (Do not activate the CLUI in the directory auto/07p or in any of its subdirectories.) Then type

auto.

If your command search path has been correctly set (see Section 1.1), this command will start the AUTO CLUI interactive interpretor and provide you with the AUTO CLUI prompt.

\begin{figure}
% latex2html id marker 482
{\small
\begin{center}\begin{boxedve...
...\tt auto} at the Unix shell prompt starts the
{\cal AUTO}~CLUI. }
\end{figure}

In addition to the examples in the following sections there are several example scripts which can be found in auto/07p/demos/python and are listed in Table 4.1. These scripts are fully annotated and provide good examples of how AUTO CLUI scripts are written. The scripts in auto/07p/demos/python/n-body are especially lucid examples and preform various related parts of a calculation involving the gravitional N-body problem. Scripts which end in the suffix .auto are called ``basic'' scripts and can be run by typing auto scriptname.auto. The scripts show in Section 4.3 and Section 4.5 are examples of basic scripts. Scripts which end in the suffix .xauto are called ``expert'' scripts and can be run by typing autox scriptname.xauto. More information on expert scripts can be found in Section 4.6. See the README file in that directory for more information.


Table 4.1: The various demonstration scripts for the AUTO CLUI.
Script Description
demo1.auto

The demo script from Section 4.3.

demo2.auto

The demo script from Section 4.5.

userScript.xauto

The expert demo script from Figure 4.12.

userScript.py

The loadable expert demo script from Figure 4.13.

fullTest.auto

A script which uses the entire AUTO command set, except for the plotting commands.

plotter.auto

A demonstration of some of the plotting capabilities of AUTO .

fullTest.auto

A script which implements the tutorial from Section 12.8.

n-body/compute_lagrange_points_family.auto

A basic script which computes and plots all of the ``Lagrange points'' as a function of the ratio of the masses of the two planets.

n-body/compute_lagrange_points_0.5.auto

A basic script which computes all of the ``Lagrange points'' for the case where the masses of the two planets are equal, and saves the data.

n-body/compute_periodic_family.xauto

An expert script which starts at a ``Lagrange point'' computed by compute_lagrange_points_0.5.auto and continues in the ratio of the masses until a specified mass ratio is reached. It then computes a family of periodic orbits for each pair of purely complex eigenvalues.

n-body/to_matlab.xauto

A script which takes a set of AUTO data files and creates a set of files formatted for importing into Matlab for either plotting or further calculations.



next up previous contents
Next: First Example Up: Running AUTO using Python Previous: Typographical Conventions   Contents
Gabriel Lord 2007-11-19