Common command-line options

The MINC tools use a large and sometimes bewildering set of command line options to control the behavior of the tools. Rather than treat each tool separately, this section will attempt to explain some of the more common command line options.

Most options are introduced with a single ``dash'' character.

Many of these command line options have default values, so if you don't explicitly specify a value, the program will just assume that you want the ``normal'' behavior. The default options are indicated in bold type in each entry below.

• -version - This option will cause the tool to print its version number and exit. No other action will be taken.
• -help - This option asks the tool to print a summary of all of the options that it recognizes, with brief descriptions of each option.
• -noclobber and -clobber - These options control whether or not a MINC tool will overwrite an existing output file. Normal behavior of all MINC tools is to refuse to replace an existing file. For example, if you already have a file named ``test.mnc'' in the same directory as ``input.mnc'', and you type the following:
  

  mincreshape -transverse -noclobber input.mnc test.mnc
  

  The program would refuse to run, because doing so would destroy the existing test.mnc file. If you specify the -clobber option, the program would replace the existing file with the new output file.

• -quiet and -verbose - Specifying '-verbose' will cause the program to print a more extensive list of intermediate actions and calculations, which may be useful for debugging. Specifying '-quiet' will suppress most of these messages.

• -2 - This option tells the program to produce a MINC 2 format output file.