Squirrel Tool - dataset inspection and management

The squirrel command line tool is a front-end to the Squirrel data access infrastructure. It offers functionality to

• manage separate (isolated, local) environments for different projects.

• pre-scan / index file collections.

• inspect various aspects of a data collection.

• download data from online sources (FDSN web services, earthquake catalogs).

• manage persistent selections to speed up access to very large datasets.

Basics

The squirrel tool and its subcommands are self-documenting with the --help option. Run squirrel without any options to get the list of available subcommands. Run squirrel SUBCOMMAND --help to get details about a specific subcommand.

Common options

Options shared between subcommands are grouped into three categories:

• General options include --loglevel to select the program’s verbosity and --progress to control how progress status is indicated. These are provided by all of Squirrel’s subcommands.

• Data collection options control which files and other data sources should be aggregated to form a dataset. The --add option to add files and directories. Further options are available to include/exclude files by regular expression patterns, to restrict to use selected content kinds only (waveform, station, channel, response, event), to create persistent data selections and more. Finally, the --dataset option is provided to configure the dataset conveniently in a YAML file rather than repeatedly with the many command line options. Using --dataset includes the possibility to add online data sources.

• Data query options are used to restrict processing/presentation to a subset of a data collection. They have no influence on the data collection itself, only on what is shown. It is possible to query by time interval (--tmin, --tmax, --time), channel/station code pattern (--codes), and content kinds (--kinds).