prelis2 Program
DESCRIPTION
Program for multivariate data screening and data
summarization. Produces correlation and covariance
matrices and estimates of their respective asymptotic
covariance matrices to be used by the lisrel8 program.
Supports foreground and background operations.
SYNTAX ( foreground operation )
prelis2 [inputfile] [outputfile] [-size=nnnn] [-noquery]
where:
inputfile
filename (with path if necessary) of the PRELIS command
file (described in Joreskog, K.G. and Sorbom, D. (1988)
PRELIS, A Preprocessor for LISREL. User's Guide.
Chicago, IL: Scientific Software).
Filename and path may be up to 127 characters long.
Default: INPUT
Note: PRELIS will prompt for an alternate filename if
the file cannot be found. The program will stop
if the file exists, but the user has no read-access
rights.
outputfile
filename (with path if necessary) of the PRELIS list
output file.
Filename and path may be up to 64 characters long.
Default: OUTPUT
Note: PRELIS will terminate if the user does not have
write-access rights for both file and directory.
-size=nnnn
Size of the dynamically allocated workspace memory
region (in Kbytes) for data storage and
transformations.
Default: 256
Note: If a region of nnnnK is not available,
the programs will display the size of the largest
available memory region and request a new size value.
Note: In addition to this workspace (size) allocation,
prelis reserves at least another 256K to satisfy
low-level dynamic memory requirements such as file
buffers (cf. AIX-LISREL7/PRELIS User instructions).
-noquery
(Logical switch) Short form: -noq
When this option is given on the command line, the
program will take default actions if necessary resources
are missing or insufficient. In particular, it will
(a) automatically use the largest possible memory region
for workspace if the '-size' parameter is set too
large,
(b) terminate if a specified input file could not be
found, and
(c) overwrite existing files with the same name as PRELIS
output files if they are not write-protected.
Note: When the '-noquery' option is used, both input
and output filenames must appear on the command line,
otherwise the defaults INPUT and OUTPUT are enforced.
Syntax ( background operation )
prelis2 [inputfile] [outputfile] [-size=nnnn] (ampersand)
When a trailing ampersand (&) is added to the prelis command
line, then the program will run in the background. It is
important to remember that no dialog with the user is
possible in background mode, and the program will behave
just as if the '-noquery' switch had been set. In all other
respects, the prelis command line arguments have the same
meaning as in the foreground mode.
If the program encounters start-up difficulties before the
outputfile has been opened, it will leave a diagnostic
message in a file called 'prelis.log' and terminate.
prelis.log will be located either in the user's home
directory, or in the default working directory from which
the program was started.
Examples
a. To compute a large covariance matrix, using the PRELIS
command file 'large.input.problem', with a workspace
allocation of 4Mbytes and to send the list output to the
file 'big.output', specify:
prelis2 large.input.problem big.output -size=4096
b. To execute the previous example in the background, simply
append an ampersand at the end of the command line:
prelis large.input.problem big.output -size=4096 &
Sample Problems (from the User's Guide)
All sample problems presented in the User's Guide were
shipped as ASCII files with the original PRELIS distribution
material. Please contact the system administrator for
information about where these files are now stored.
Related Program(s)
To estimate confirmatory factor analyses and/or structural
equation models using the descriptive statistics produced by
PRELIS, use the lisrel8 program, also installed on this
system.
LISREL(r) is a registered trademark of Scientific Software, Inc.
PRELIS(tm) is a trademark of Scientific Software, Inc.
