How to use these programs

These programs are kept in directories that vary from system to system; they may not be in the default search path. If you cannot find them, consult an expert (such as the person who installed the WFDB library on your system). If you use these programs often, you may wish to include the directory in which they are kept in your search path.

To use any of these programs, you will need to set the database path first (see section The Database Path and Other Environment Variables), unless the default database path (‘. /usr/database http://physionet.org/physiobank/database’) is suitable. Programs that accept time arguments or commands (usually shown as from and to below) use strtim to convert these strings into sample intervals; hence they accept any of the varieties of standard time format described earlier (see section timstr and strtim). Programs that accept annotation mnemonics as arguments or commands (usually shown as code below) use strann to interpret them; for a list of legal mnemonics, see section Annotation Codes. Where record or annotator names are required as command arguments, they are indicated below as record or annotator.

In the remainder of this appendix, you will find usage examples and capsule descriptions of the standard WFDB application programs. The square brackets (‘[ ]’) in some of the usage examples surround arguments that may be omitted; the brackets themselves are not to be included in the command line. Where an ellipsis (‘...’) appears, it indicates that the previous argument may be repeated. If invoked without any arguments, or with a ‘-h’ (help) option, most of these programs print a brief synopsis of how they are used.