Interactive mode
Default mode
When you start mothur, you will see a screen that looks like this:
Mac version
Using ReadLine,Boost,HDF5,GSL
mothur v.1.45.0
Last updated: 3/22/21
by
Patrick D. Schloss
Department of Microbiology & Immunology
University of Michigan
http://www.mothur.org
When using, please cite:
Schloss, P.D., et al., Introducing mothur: Open-source, platform-independent, community-supported software for describing and comparing microbial communities. Appl Environ Microbiol, 2009. 75(23):7537-41.
Distributed under the GNU General Public License
Type 'help()' for information on the commands that are available
For questions and analysis support, please visit our forum at https://forum.mothur.org
Type 'quit()' to exit program
[NOTE]: Setting random seed to 19760620.
Interactive Mode
mothur >
All of your commands will be entered from the mothur prompt. You can get a list of commands by typing help() at the prompt and you can get more specific help for each command by typing command_name(help) at the prompt. For example:
mothur > align.seqs(help)
Would give you the help file information for the align.seqs command.
If you want to quit mothur you simply enter:
mothur > quit()
or
mothur > quit
With the exception of quit, all commands require you to provide an open and close parentheses. If you supply any options there cannot be a space between the option, the ‘=’, and the option setting. To separate options, use a comma. For example:
mothur > cluster(method=opti, cutoff=0.03)
Running a batch file
You can run a batch file from the mothur prompt as follows:
mothur > stability.batch
Environment Variables
Environment variables can be used to generalize variables for reuse. Let’s add environment variables to our analysis.
Format
The format of environmental variables is [tag]=[value]. For example, let’s create a environment variable for the processors option.
PROC=12
mothur will automatically pull in the systems environment variable. For example you can set variables in bash and then run mothur:
. mothurMac-3% export REFERENCE_LOCATION=/Users/sarahwestcott/Desktop/release . mothurMac-3% export ALIGNREF=silva.v4.fasta . mothurMac-3% export TAXONREF_FASTA=trainset9_032012.pds.fasta . mothurMac-3% export TAXONREF_TAX=trainset9_032012.pds.tax . mothurMac-3% export CONTAMINENTS=Chloroplast-Mitochondria-unknown-Archaea-Eukaryota . mothurMac-3% export LOGNAME=MiSEQ_SOP_mouse_03032020 . mothurMac-3% export DATA=/Users/sarahwestcott/Desktop/MiSeq_SOP . mothurMac-3% export TYPE=gz . mothurMac-3% export PROC=12 . mothurMac-3% ./mothur
Type 'quit()' to exit program
[note]: Setting random seed to 19760620.
mothur > set.logfile(name=$LOGNAME)
mothur > set.dir(input=$DATA) . mothur's directories:
inputDir=/Users/sarahwestcott/Desktop/MiSeq_SOP
Use
The ‘$’ symbol indicates to mothur that the value is an environment variable to be replaced with the actual value at run time. For example:
PROC=12
make.contigs(file=current, processors=$PROC)
is equivalent to
make.contigs(file=current, processors=12)
You can create an environment variable for anything you wish as well as combining variables. For example:
mothur > REFERENCE_LOCATION=/Users/sarahwestcott/Desktop/release
Setting environment variable REFERENCE_LOCATION to /Users/sarahwestcott/Desktop/release
mothur > ALIGNREF=silva.v4.fasta
Setting environment variable ALIGNREF to silva.v4.fasta
mothur > align.seqs(fasta=my.fasta, reference=$REFERENCE_LOCATION/$ALIGNREF)
Alternatively, If you know what commands you will be running, you can use either the command line mode or batch mode.