Xinfo

xinfo

Local metadata and counts helper built on xcommon.sh plus rchive. It reports available postings fields, indexed terms, and count/totals summaries from a configured local postings directory.

Quick Start

• Command: xinfo -db <database> -fields
• Local executable: /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/xinfo
• Critical environment: EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE

When To Use This Tool

• Listing local postings fields for a database
• Counting or expanding indexed terms from a local archive setup
• Getting local totals for a field such as PROP or YEAR
• Debugging local postings contents rather than querying remote einfo

Common Patterns

# Show help
xinfo -h

# List local fields
export EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE=/path/to/local/archive
xinfo -db pubmed -fields

# Get local term counts
export EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE=/path/to/local/archive
xinfo -db pubmed -count 'catabolite repress*'

Recommended Workflow

1. Configure EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE so the tool can discover the postings directory.
2. Start with -fields to confirm the local postings layout.
3. Move on to -terms, -count, -counts, or -totals once the field structure looks sane.
4. Treat failures as local-postings problems first, not as remote NCBI outages.

Guardrails

• -h/--help are safe and show usage, but --version is not supported; locally it triggered the missing-path error and ERROR: Unrecognized option --version.
• This is a local postings tool, not a wrapper around remote einfo.
• Source inspection shows -fields literally changes into the postings directory and lists subdirectories, while -count/-counts/-totals delegate to rchive.
• In local testing without EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE, xinfo -db pubmed -fields printed the missing-path error and then accidentally listed the current working directory because cd "$postingsBase" fell through with an empty path.