but then you have to ask every beamline owner to change the file names, at each synchrotron...
Not necessarily, it really only applies to those generating 10's or 100's of scans such as scanning in QEXAFS mode. Not to mention that it is already implemented in many beamlines that had the foresight on this issue and implemented a solution when the beamlines were first created. :-) However, I do agree that some level of group cut/paste could be helpful in Athena.
I am willing to go out on a limb and state in a public forum that the people who run beamlines and write data acquisition software have a responsibility to their users to think hard about the decisions they make, acknowledging that even the smallest detail may end up being important to someone. Darek's problem is *not* an Athena-specific problem. It is both well-known and correct to state that numbers should be zero-padded if sorting strings containing those numbers should be the same when done numerically as alphabetically. Athena is hardly the only program that would order these files other than how Darek wanted them. The beamlines DAQ software shares responsibility for this failure of Athena. You could argue that Athena should consider file time stamp when ordering files as they are read in, but sorting alphabetically is a valid and unsurprising choice. That Athena should be more flexible in resorting the data in the group list is a completely valid feature request and will get my attention. All that said, I agree with Dan. If there is a problem at the beamline, the user has a right to complain loudly (but politely, of course). Oh, and I, too, am a "beamline owner". B -- Bruce Ravel ----------------------------------- bravel@bnl.gov National Institute of Standards and Technology Synchrotron Methods Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory Building 535A Upton NY, 11973 My homepage: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel EXAFS software: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/