Deal with Catalogs in astronomy

Did you have try to run Sextractor? Did you save spectra data with a catalog file of several columns? How did you save your astronomical data? It could be a catalog. Now I introduce my way to deal with these files.

(1)  Command lines. Using small program+awk
My most work is using the object catalogs from Sextractor. I must search the data from a particular row in a particular column. So I made a program search.py to search the one column. To print out the results, I utilize the "awk" like this.

search [-i] catalog colx coly x y [err] | awk '{printf "%f\n",$1}' 

(2) Using TOPCAT or STILTS
Here is a ppt for quick review for these two softwares.
If you deal with large catalog and want to try some plots to show the relation, please try the two! I just begin to use them. It seems good when you want to have a quick view.

Let us enjoy the CATALOG.