The copymon routine can be used by observers to automatically copy ESI, HIRES, or LRIS images to a scratch disk. ``autocopy'' is a wrapper around copymon that removes some of the groundwork of finding a scratch disk, creating a subdirectory, etc., before copymon can be run.

Autocopy is used to automatically create a headquarters backup copy of your data, as well as to provide nearly instantaneous copies of the raw data in a directory where you can do on-line data reduction. (Note that you should NOT do data reduction directly on the disk containing your raw data!!)

In general, autocopy is launched from a menu. An xterm will appear. Do not kill the xterm, and initially watch it for questions. The script will find the headquarters scratch disk with the most space available, create or move to a subdirectory with your username (e.g. lris15), and then check the current output directory for images. If it finds any it will ask you whether you first want to copy those existing images to the HQ disk. Next it starts copymon, which will wait until the instrument signals a new file written to disk, then copy it automatically to the HQ scratch disk. To quit, either kill the xterm or Ctrl-C in the xterm to stop the process. (In the latter case the xterm will automatically disappear, if autocopy was started from a menu.)

Note:

Autocopy can also be run from the command line. On the appropriate instrument computer type ``autocopy''; that's it! If you want to force autocopy to use a specific disk, you can type ``autocopy disk_name''. disk_name can even be a summit scratch disk.