New Features in PSRCHIVE 5.1

A number of new features have been added to the PSRCHIVE software in the month since version 5.0 was released; the following list names just a few:

Scripting: The pulsar shell, psrsh, now processes a wider variety of commands and can be used to implement simple scripts. These same commands/scripts can be provided as preprocessing jobs to the psradd and psrplot programs. psrsh now also uses the command line editor with completion and history features provided by GNU readline.

Flux Calibration: The calibrator and system equivalent flux density for each receptor are now stored separately in version 2.2 of the PSRFITS file format. Previously, only total intensity information was stored.

Plotting: The pulsar plotting program, psrplot, is now able to perform a variety of preprocessing jobs using the new scripting interface described in the psrsh manual. Also, a segmentation fault that occured when loading polarization data has been fixed.

Compiling: Version 4 of the GNU compiler collection can now be used to compile the PSRCHIVE library. Prior to version 5.1, a runtime error in the polarimetric calibration code would occur. Various fixes for gcc 2.95 have also been made.

Lean: It is now possible to compile a lean version of PSRCHIVE with ./configure --enable-lean. This version omits all of the graphics and polarimetric calibration code, thereby reducing the compile time by more than a factor of two.