Xselect is a command line interface to the Ftools, for X-ray astrophysical analysis. It has four major functions:
Xselect also contains routines of importance for specific missions. Currently, there are only ASCA specific commands, namely sisclean, gisclean, faint and fast.
In addition, there are routines to plot up various aspects of the event data, and of the HK and auxiliary filter data.
There are also general utility commands to view the internal state of Xselect, to view the raw data files, to clear various selections, data choices, etc., and to save the products of the analysis.
In the Introduction section, we sketch the workings of Xselect. There is also a section on the command line interpreter used by Xselect: XPI. It allows scripting, aliasing, spawning, and command recall. It also has a few particularities that must be attended to.
In the Commands section, we list all the Xselect commands available, with a brief description. There is also a list of all the temporary files that Xselect produces, and each one's purpose. Finally, we point out some of the current shortcomings and features of Xselect.
A note on the usage of this manual before we proceed: each Xselect session is given a session prefix, which is prepended to the names of the product files, and appears in the prompts. In the rest of this manual, we will use the default session name: xsel. Replace this with your own session name for all the Xselect temporary files.