Before discussing the format of the output produced above
(), let us consider how to read it back,
so as to reconstruct the original Object. Naturally, we would first
need to save the output in a file. On UNIX systems, we can do that
simply by redirecting standard output to a file using a shell command
like:
program1 >file
Within a subsequent program, we can read this Object back in by using the AST_READ function, having first created a suitable Channel:
OBJECT = AST_READ( CHANNEL, STATUS )
By default, this function will read from the standard input stream (the default source for a basic Channel), so we would need to ensure that our second program reads its input from the file in which the Object description is stored. On UNIX systems, we could again use a shell redirection command such as:
program2 <file
AST A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy