Usage

Syntax: banker [option] <data> [<bank>]

Options are one or more of the following characters preceded by “-” or “/”. If no option specified, then hashed bank will be produced.

Examples:

banker lift.dat              :produces default bank (LIFT.HBK, LIFT.HIN)
banker -h lift.dat           :produces LIFT.HBK, LIFT.HIN
banker -b101 lift.dat        :makes the hashed bank with 101 bins
banker -d lift.dat           :make hashed bank, debugging only
banker -c lift.dat           :produces LIFT.CBK, LIFT.CIN
banker -cv lift.dat          : and displays series names while processing
banker -cvtinforum lift.dat  : and makes the bank_title "inforum"
banker -ctinforum-d lift.dat :debugging, with bank_title "inforum"
banker -cdtinforum lift.dat  :debugging, and bank_title = "inforum"
banker -cd lift.dat          :make compressed bank, debugging only

Note that normally only the first option switch is required to be preceded with ‘-’ or ‘/’, but there is a caveat with the -t switch. If it is chosen and a bank title is attached next to it, then the next chosen option must be preceded with ‘-’ or ‘/’. If your bank title consists of more than one word, then connect these words with ‘+’ so that there will not be any space in between the words. In light of this, you may decide to ignore -t switch altogether, in which case you will be prompted to provide a bank title once Banker starts to run. Yet another way to provide the bank title is to bury it in brackets “{}” and put it at the very beginning of your formatted data file. In a way, brackets “{}” indicate comments to Banker.

A file named BANKER.MSG automatically will be produced for each run of Banker. It contains information on data compression status for each series as well as some other related messages. The most commom messages on data compression includes:

  • “No compression on xxx: FIRST DIFFERENCE TOO LARGE or all-zero series.”

  • “No compression on yyy: HUGE NUMBER ENCOUNTERED.”

The first simply means that series XXX is an all-zero series or that its largest first difference is greater than 32767. Note that for G-style compression purposes, the first difference is taken AFTER all of the decimal places have been moved to the right until the series is all integers. This point also might help you to understand the second message, in which case the largest first difference so calculated exceeds LONG_MAX (or 2,147,483,647), a condition that we call “HUGE NUMBER ENCOUNTERED”, even though the largest first difference may not exceed LONG_MAX (or 2,147,483,647) if we had not first slid the decimal to the right until the series was all integers.