Volume 1 Chapter 3 Basic Conventions and Concepts
Currently, the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) releases software tailored for two specific operating systems:
In addition, a version of the software is provided which will run on all computers with a FORTRAN77 compiler which supports 32-bit integers. This version is called:
If you are using QUEST, GSTAT or PLUTO on a machine running other than VMS, or UNIX, you should consult the person who installed the software at your site to learn how to start the programs.
Users of the MIP Graphics Version should skip to section 4.3 ("Starting the Graphical Interface Software").
Users of the MIP Basic Version should skip to the section 4.4 ("Automating the QUEST Start-up").
Firstly, the user chooses a `problem name'. This is usually a descriptive word, indicating the nature of the search to be performed. Any files created by QUEST will have this `problem name' as the `stem', coupled with a suffix (usually three characters) indicating the type or contents of the file. Thus, the characters making up `problem name' must be valid characters for file names on your computer.
For example, suppose we are about to perform a search for steroid compounds in the database. We might choose the problem name "steroid". At the end of the search, VMS users would find a file called STEROID.JNL and UNIX users would find a file called steroid.jnl. This is the QUEST Journal file, which provides a log of the search performed.
Note: VMS file names are, of course, always upper-case, whereas UNIX file names retain the case with which they were typed. All file extensions in the CCDC UNIX procedures are lower-case, thus we adopt the convention of using lower-case problem names in the UNIX examples used here. You may use any combination of upper- and lower-case characters and, of course, certain non-alphabetic characters, when typing problem names.
We give here the simplest example for starting QUEST in each of the machine-specific implementations:
