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location: ZilUtility

Zil_utils - utilities for DMDX zil files

This page very briefly describes a set of utilities which process DMDX .zil files from fMRI experiments.See the zil_soas help for features and usage of the main zil_soas program. This help information is also available by running zil_soas from the command line thus: 

zil_soas.pl -help  (help summary)
zil_soas.pl -help -verbose (more extensive)
zil_soas.pl -man   (full documentation)

Note that the current version is very preliminary. I would very much appreciate feedback (see below). In particular, the parsing of the DMDX rtf file may be rather fragile, so I would be pleased to get examples of valid DMDX rtf files that break these routines.

Installing

The program is written entirely in perl. You will need a working version of perl 5 on your system. To install, download the latest version of the zil_utils archive from the zil_utils directory. Unpack it into a temporary directory. You now have four programs, "zil_soas.pl", "zil_trs.pl", "zil_times.pl" and "zil_sub_times.pl" and one directories, "DMDX". Copy the directory to a directory on your perl library path. You may then need to edit the top line of the .pl programs to make sure they can find your version of perl. At the moment the top line reads: 

. If your version of perl is not at this path, change it to the correct path. You may be able to find your copy of perl with "which perl" from the Unix prompt. Then copy the .pl program files to somewhere on your executable path. To test the installation, and as an example of a real zil file, use the example files in the zil_utils directory thus: 
zil_soas.pl out_test.zil -rtf inp_test.rtf -subject 1 -dummies 9 -pdelay 0 -clobber -misstrs 0 -omititem 1000 -respstr +Bit1 -respstr +Bit2 -esttr 1607 -verbose


The End


I hope these utilities are useful to you. If you have any problems, please email me (address below) and I will try and help. I will probably ask for your .rtf and .zil files, so perhaps you can save time by sending them to me.Matthew Brett 4th October 2002 
An alternative to using these zil utilities is to use some awk scripts that Matt Davis wrote for a similar purpose. These convert .zil files into .txt files suitable for importing into Excel, SPSS, etc. You can read more about these, here.