This branch of the ISIP environment contains utilities developed from the foundation classes and miscellaneous scripting tools. These utilities share a common command line interface and support a uniform look and feel across a variety of technologies.

Some significant features of these utilities are

unicode compatibility and wide character support to allow multilingual applications;
transparent file list processing;
flexible command line argument parsing;
user-programmable debugging levels;
consistent and comprehensive error reporting.

Our command line interface, which is shared by all utilities, is best explained via an example using a simple utility, isip_make_sof. Click here to view the manual page for this utility. A typical command line will look like this:

isip_make_sof -sample_frequency 8000 -num_bytes 2 -encoding linear -type text speech.raw Our command line interface conforms to most standard Unix conventions. There are a few basic interface features to note:

The command line follows standard Unix conventions, and consists of items we refer to as options (e.g., "-num_bytes") and arguments (e.g., speech.raw).
Options, which are preceded by a dash ("-") may appear in any order.
Arguments (e.g., "speech.raw") are sometimes required to appear in a specific order. Alternately, you can often enumerate a set of arguments to be processed using standard command line regular expression pattern matching (e.g., "*/*/*.raw").
The name of the option can be abbreviated to the shortest name that is unique. For example, "-sample_frequency" is often entered using "-samp" or even "-s" in this utility (since no other options begin with "s").

Help is available for all utilities. Extended help messages can be obtained by inserting "-help" anywhere on the command line:

isip_make_sof -sample_frequency 8000 -help -num_bytes 2
This will display the help message show below:

isip221_[1]: isip_make_sof -help
name: isip_make_sof
synopsis: isip_make_sof [options] file(s)
descr: coverts raw audio files to Sof audio files
example: isip_make_sof -encoding linear -sample_frequency 8000.0 file.raw

options:
 -encoding: format of the raw data (default = linear)
 -num_bytes: the number of bytes for each sample (default = 2)
 -sample_frequency: sample frequency for the data
 -byte_order: byte order for raw data (default = native)
 -list: file containing input file list in Sdb format
 -output_directory: output directory
 -new_extension: output file extension
 -dir_pres_level: number of levels of subdirectories to preserve (def 0)
 -debug: debug level, either NONE, BRIEF, DETAILED, or ALL 
 -verbose: how verbose should the output be? (default NONE)
 -help: display this help message
 
arguments: sdb or sof files can be passed as arguments

man page: none

A brief help message can often be obtained by typing the command name with no arguments:

isip221_[1]: isip_make_sof
Usage: isip_make_sof [options] file(s)
        specify the -help option for more information

Debugging information can be obtained by specifying the debug option "-debug". Allowable values are "NONE", "BRIEF", "DETAILED", and "ALL". These provide varying amounts of detail to the console (stdout in most cases). All utilities and classes support this interface.
A man page can be located by transforming the man page path listed on the page (e.g., $ISIP/util/speech/isip_make_sof/index.html) to a URL (e.g., http://www.isip.msstate.edu/projects/speech/software/documentation/util/speech/isip_make_sof/index.html). These pages are also available in your local installation.

The structure of the utility directories is explained below:

Speech (/speech):	... isip_transform, isip_recognize ...
Development Tools (/devel):	... isip_tkdiff, isip_varmint, and dmalloc_run ...
Miscellaneous (/misc):	... isip_e, isip_ci, isip_chmod ...

The misc directory contains miscellaneous tools we use in our day-to-day computing environment. The devel directory provides some useful software engineering and development tools. Most users will interact with the environment through the speech directory, which contains the core speech recognition and speech processing tools. Each library in the above table is linked to a short description of the library, including a tutorial on how to use the tools in that library.