Nate Vack wrote:

> The
> magical -prefix argument has caused me countless hours of
> scripting frustration.

It complicates scripting for me too, particularly with those couple of functions that won't work if a path is included in -prefix instead of being supplied separately in -session. Luckily many do.

> Life is so very much easier when you can say "Store your data
> in a file called foo.nii"

Agreed. (Of course, if I understood Rick's old post correctly, it just so happens you CAN do that but only for nifti files.)

It's one thing to offer a dataset/file reference convention that builds in domain-knowledge in order to allow shorter arguments. To only accept that convention (and not allow exact filenames) is quite another.

It throws a monkey wrench in many shell features like completion and wildcard expansion. It would complicate pipelining with standard Linux utilities, too, though I can't remember a time I tried to do that.

(Maybe a new topic should be started for this. (?))