Usage

This package provides two separate command line interfaces, one for splitting FASTA files on substring occurrence and the main interface that provides a large number of small conversion and manipulation procedures.

fastools

The fastools command line interface provides a large number of elementary procedures that can be chained to get more complex behaviour. The elementary procedures can be accessed as subcommands of the main program. To get the full list of subcommands, type:

fastools -h

To get help on a specific subcommand, e.g., sanitise, type:

fastools sanitise -h

As mentioned above, more complex behaviour can be obtained by chaining elementary command by using UNIX pipes. For example, Fastools has the subcommand gen for generating a random FASTA record and the subcommand fa2fq to convert a FASTA file to a FASTQ file. To combine these two subcommands, we do the following:

fastools gen - name description 60 | fastools fa2fq - output.fq

This produces a FASTQ file containing one random sequence. Similarly a dash (-) can always be used instead of a file name to use standard input or standard output.

Automatic detection of input formats

Some subcommands, like lenfilt, accepts both FASTA and FASTQ files as input. The output format will be set to the same type as the input format. So to use this command with FASTA files, we use:

fastools lenfilt -l 25 input.fa small.fa large.fa

and for FASTQ, we can use:

fastools lenfilt -l 25 input.fq small.fq large.fq

In both cases, sequences larger than 25 are written to the large file, the other sequences are written to the small file.

split_fasta

The split_fasta program splits a FASTA file based on the occurrence of markers. For more information, use the help option:

split_fasta -h