Merging fire Files

[tomeichlersmith]

Combining files after a thorough skim would make analysis of the data much easier. I'm imagining another executable (written in C++ or Python) that would handle combining files in a way that preserves the necessary internal file relationships so that the output file can still be an input fire file and work with our ecosystem.

This would include managing the RunHeader dataset so that overwriting is prevented.

[tomeichlersmith]

I think writing it in C++ would be best, and I think we could include it in the fire executable by having sub-commands. For now, we would just have the new merge and the current run (which is the default if not subcommand is given), but it would then be easy to integrate other subcommands (e.g. a reformat for batch conversion of ROOT to HDF5).

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
  if (argc < 2) {
    usage();
    return 1;
  }
  std::string arg{argv[1]};
  if (arg == "merge") {
    return merge(argc-1, argv+1); 
  } else if (arg == "run") {
    return run(argc-1, argv+1);
  } else {
    return run(argc, argv);
  }
}