If the problem is that you want to input a lot of files to a statistics program, such as 3dRegAna, another approach is needed. If you make the last option on the command line be "-@", then the program will copy the contents of standard input (stdin) to the tail of the command line. (This feature is part of the AFNI package, not a part of Unix.) You can use this in one of two ways:

• 3dRegana -@ < filename

  where filename contains the information to copy onto the command line. (This file may have linebreaks -- it doesn't have to be one big line. No line should have over 4000 characters, though.)

• 3dRegana -@ << ENDSTRING
  options
  more options
  ....
  ENDSTRING

  This method uses a feature of the shells csh and sh, where the standard input of the program is read from the input file (rather than the user's terminal) up until a line that matches the characters just to the right of the "<<" -- in this case, I've used "ENDSTRING" as this marker. An advantage of this method is that the inputs for the program are in the same shell script that you are using to run the program, rather than being in a separate file. If you choose to use this technique, a glance at the man pages for your shell of choice would be in order.

[20 Apr 2001]: This method is now implemented into the following programs:

3dANOVA2 3dANOVA3 3dANOVA 3dbucket 3dcalc 3dDeconvolve 3dDetrend 3dfim 3dfim+ 3dFriedman 3dKruskalWallis 3dMannWhitney 3dmaskdump 3dMean 3dmerge 3dNLfim 3dOverlap 3dpc 3drefit 3dRegAna 3dROIstats 3drotate 3dStatClust 3dTcat 3dttest 3dUndump 3dvolreg 3dWavelets 3dWilcoxon to3d

Note Well: Each group of characters read in by "-@" separated by "whitespace" (blanks, tabs, newlines) will be appended as a separate argument to the program.

• In particular, you cannot embed a blank in an argument using quotes, unlike if the argument were actually on the command line.
• The shell does not do filename expansion (globbing) on "-@" data, so you do not escape or quote wildcards such as the *?[] characters.
• If you use the "<<" input method described above, the shell does do $ variable expansion on the input lines, so any dollar signs in the input stream need to be escaped with the backslash \ character: \$ (that is, unless you want shell variables to be expanded there).
• Not all the above programs have been tested with "-@"; please let me know if there are any problems.