| name | xinfo |
| description | Use when inspecting fields, indexed terms, or term counts from a local EDirect postings index rather than the remote `einfo` endpoint. |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
| user-invocable | true |
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
xinfo -h
export EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE=/path/to/local/archive
xinfo -db pubmed -fields
export EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE=/path/to/local/archive
xinfo -db pubmed -count 'catabolite repress*'
Recommended Workflow
- Configure
EDIRECT_LOCAL_ARCHIVE so the tool can discover the postings directory.
- Start with
-fields to confirm the local postings layout.
- Move on to
-terms, -count, -counts, or -totals once the field structure looks sane.
- 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.
