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.