Configuring EMBOSS differently for different groups of users

It may be the case that you have users who need to share a specific setup. Maybe to have access to different sets of databases or need to use a different data directory.

It can be time consuming and error prone to maintain a series of individual

.embossrc

files or to cause users to have to work in the same directory or to copy an

.embossrc

to each directory they wish to work in. The environment variable

EMBOSSRC

can be set to point to an arbitrary directory containing an

.embossrc

which can then be used to give workgroup specific configuration. Each user then only needs to set

EMBOSSRC

in their

.cshrc

( csh) or

.profile

( bash) to get the workgroup specific setup.

In our case we have several groups of researchers for whom we maintain biological sequence databases. These databases have been made available under restrictive licenses so that we cannot allow researchers outside the groups to access the databases. Using

$EMBOSSRC

we can set up a common configuration for the members of each group by defining the databases in the

$EMBOSSRC/.embossrc

file.