Scisoft is a collection of astronomical software utilities from ESO.

We have two options to access it

• scisoft module
• direct access

Unfortunately each has some caveats. The main one is that initializing scisoft modifies your environment extensively, and can cause problems with many other programs. For this reason we no longer attempt to initialize it automatically for you during login, and we recommend you don't blindly do so yourself in your own login scripts.

You can activate our scisoft module using module load scisoft.

This has the advantage that you can can use module unload scisoft to remove it again from your environment.

Unfortunately scisoft was never designed to be run this way so we can't be sure that all parts of it operate correctly (please send feedback to the usual place, we can attempt to refine the module definition).

Scisoft should be directly available on most systems under /scisoft (either locally or via symbolic link).

To initialize it, users of the “bash” shell can use:

. /scisoft/bin/Setup.bash

“csh” and “tcsh” users should invoke the command:

source /scisoft/bin/Setup.csh

<note warning>Be aware that if you add these to your login scripts, it may have adverse effects on other programs. If you see strange effects, your first action should be to remove the scisoft setup and retry. </note>