Raconvert reads comman separated ASCII argus data from a file or stdin, and converts the ASCII representation to binary format. In order for raconver to process the delimited data correctly, the file should be created by ra.1 like programs, using the "-c <char>" option to specify a field separator. Column delimiters can be any non-ambiguous character, and are automatically discovered from the files title string.

Because raconvert.1 expects the first valid string in the file to be a ra.1 column title line, the ra.1 program must use the equivalent of the "-L 0" option.

The file can present its column oriented data in any order, and raconvert will accomodate. Duplicate columns on the same line are allowed, but the final value in the resulting argus record with be the last value encountered.

raconvert.1 can read gzip and bzip2 compressed files, based on the file extension.