[GRASS-user] GRASS GIS 6.4 batch

[Hamish]

Rasmus Borgstrøm wrote:
> As I understand you it is not possible

.. make no mistake: this is a very flexible GIS platform,
almost everything is possible, it just requires a little effort
to add new things if they aren't there already.

if you are comfortable with writing/editing msdos batch files,
I think you have a good chance of success. (contributing a very
worthwhile bit of knowledge to all other WinGRASS users in the
process)

> to do the batch processing in Windows then?  (Unix is not an
> option here). 

GRASS ships with "MSys" which provides a lot of UNIX tools re-
built for Windows, including the UNIX shell. Nothing new to
install. (If you did want a full UNIX environment on Windows,
that would be "Cygwin", but that is overkill in this case)

> If I am wrong about this, can you please explain me a bit
> further how to get started? I did not get much out of the
> "GRASS_BATCH_JOB" sections. 

The trick is to tell GRASS at startup that you want to run the
batch job, and what data to run it on, instead of opening up the
interactive "Welcome to GRASS, pick a mapset" window.

I do not have a Windows machine on hand to test with, maybe it
is not so hard to get it to work.

May I ask if your task is for bulk-processing (single repetitive
job over a big pile of data) or for on-demand processing? (e.g.
processing begins once job requirements or new data arrive,
like from a web site you run)
?

how comfortable are you with editing/writing msdos .bat files?
how about the Python programming language? (the future of grass
scripting)


regards,
Hamish