What is Compare ?
Compare is a
Root-based tool, dedicated to plot large amounts of data as produced
for example when analysing the output of Monte Carlo event generators.
In this context Compare can be invoked to plot histograms of
particle spectra, eventually including data, generate difference plots,
rebin histograms, carry out algebraic operations on the histograms,
integrate or differentiate them and write newly created histograms
to disk. Once a full setup, specifying what to do with the input
data is generated, input paths and files can be easily changed
to carry out the same procedure on different data sets.
Examples of how the output looks like can be found on the
Sherpa Wiki analysis section.
How do I obtain Compare ?
Simply check out the most recent version using the link below and follow the installation instructions.
On Ubuntu systems, Compare may be installed using the system installer. To do so, the launchpad hep repository must be activated using
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hep/ubuntu lucid main" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hep.list
sudo aptitude update
Installation proceeds through
sudo aptitude install compareafter which Compare can be found under /usr/bin/Compare.
How do I install Compare ?
Unzip and untar the archive
tar -xzf Compare-1.9.tar.gz
Configure and install the package via
./configure
make install
Note: The default prefix is $PWD ! To change this setting, use the standard gnu syntax configure --prefix=<your prefix>.
Let your PATH variable point to the bin directory, e.g. for bash and the standard prefix
export PATH=$PATH:$PWD/bin
Let your MANPATH and INFOPATH variables point to the corresponding directories, e.g.
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$PWD/man
export INFOPATH=$INFOPATH:$PWD/info
Finally update the man page database
mandb $PWD/man/man1
That's it !
How do I get help on Compare ?
Compare has been developed by Andreas Schälicke, Frank Siegert and me.
Feel free to contact
us if you have any problems installing Compare or using it.
An online documentaion of the package can be found
below.
Licensing
Compare is free software.
You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation. You should have received a copy
of the GNU General Public License along with the source
for Compare; see the file COPYING.
Compare is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty
of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the GNU General Public License
for more details.
Getting started
An automatic setup generator is implemented.
In order to get started you do not need
to know the full Compare syntax.
Simply read the info page section on
automatic configuration, commandline parameter
-a.
When generating a setup for Sherpa output, add a file Final.C to the setup directory, containing the line
(final){ DATA_TYPE ATOOLS; }(final);
make sure that the corresponding reader can be loaded by setting the environment variable COMPARE_LDADD
(Compare version 1.4 and lower require export COMPARE_LDADD=CompareSherpa instead)
export COMPARE_LDADD=CompareAddOn
and have fun ...