The basic unit of neutron data at ISIS is the spectrum.
These may be big or small and there may be just a few, or many thousands of them. As a result, the basic element of data which GENIE deals with is a spectrum. Spectra can be accessed directly from the data acquisition electronics during a data collection run, or, after a run has been finished, from a raw data file.
Open genie provides two formats for exporting data, one is basically an ASCII representation of a genie variable and the other is as the "Open Genie Intermediate file". The ASCII representation is mainly intended to allow user programs to analyze the results of Genie operations and can not be readily manipulated from within genie. The "Intermediate file" is a platform independent way to store ANY genie variable in a file, attaching both a symbolic label and a comment to it. There is no limit to the number of variables that can be stored in a file, and the format is fully recursive (i.e. workspaces containing workspaces are handled properly).
Exporting/Importing ASCII representations of variables is controlled by the WRITE/ASCII and READ/ASCII commands. Details of the format used can be found in Appendix B
Intermediate files are access using the GET and PUT commands, and their contents can be viewed with the DIR command.