Gramps is a Free/OpenSource genealogy program. It is written in Python, using the GTK+/GNOME interface. Gramps should seem familiar to anyone who has used other geneology programs before such as Family Tree Maker (TM), Personal Ancestral Files (TM), or the GNU Geneweb. It supports importing of the ever popular GEDCOM format which is used world wide by almost all other genealogy software.

gramps FILE

When FILE is given (without any flags) then it is opened and an interactive session is started. The rest of the options is ignored. This way of launching is suitable for using gramps as a handler for genealogical data in e.g. web browsers. This invokation can accept any data format native to gramps, see below.

-f,--format= FORMAT

Explicitly specify format of FILE given by preceding -O, -i, or -o option. If the -f option is not given for any FILE, the format of that file is guessed according to its extension.

Formats available for opening are grdb (guessed if FILE ends with .grdb), gramps-xml (guessed if FILE ends with .gramps), and gedcom (guessed if FILE ends with .ged).

Formats available for import are grdb, gramps-xml, gedcom, gramps-pkg (guessed if FILE ends with .gpkg), and geneweb (guessed if FILE ends with .gw).

Formats available for export are grdb, gramps-xml, gedcom, gramps-pkg, wft (guessed if FILE ends with .wft), geneweb, and iso (never guessed, always specify with -f option).

-O,--open= FILE

Open FILE. Only grdb, gramps-xml, and gedcom formats can be opened directly. For other formats, you will need to use the import option which will set up the empty database and then import data into it.

Only a single file can be opened. If you need to combine data from several sources, you will need to use the import option.

-i,--import= FILE

Import data from FILE.

When more than one input file is given, each has to be preceded by -i flag. The files are imported in the specified order, i.e. -i FILE1 -i FILE2 and -i FILE2 -i FILE1 might produce different gramps IDs in the resulting database.

-o,--output= FILE

Export data into FILE. For iso format, the FILE is actually the name of directory the gramps database will be written into. For grdb, gramps-xml, gedcom, wft, gramps-pkg, and geneweb, the FILE is the name of the resulting file.

When more than one output file is given, each has to be preceded by -o flag. The files are written one by one, in the specified order.

-a,--action= ACTION

Perform ACTION on the imported data. This is done after all imports are succesfully completed. Currently available actions are summary (same as Reports->View->Summary), check (same as Tools->Database Processing->Check and Repair), and report (generates report, needs the OPTIONSTRING supplied by the -p flag).

The report option string should satisfy the following conditions: It must not contain any spaces. If some arguments need to include spaces, the string should be enclosed with quotation marks. Option string must list pairs of option names and values. Withing a pair, option name and value must be separated by the equality sign. Different pairs must be separated by commas.

Most of the report options are specific for every report. However, there some common options.

name=reportname This mandatory option determines which report will be generated. If the supplied report_name does not correspond to any available report, the error message will be printed followed by the list of available reports.

show=all This will produce the list of names for all options available for a given report.

show=optionname This will print the description of the functionality supplied by the optionname, as well as what are the acceptable types and values for this option.

Use the above options to find out everything about a given report.

When more than one output action is given, each has to be preceded by -a flag. The actions are performed one by one, in the specified order.

Operation If the first argument on the command line does not start with dash (i.e. no flag), gramps will attempt to open the file with the name given by the first argument and start interactive session, ignoring the rest of the command line arguments.

If the -O flag is given, then gramps will try opening the supplied file name and then work with that data, as instructed by the further command line parameters.

With or without the -O flag, there could be multiple imports, exports, and actions specified further on the command line by using -i, -o, and -a flags.

The order of -i, -o, or -a options does not matter. The actual order always is: all imports (if any) -> all actions (if any) -> all exports (if any). But opening must always be first!

If no -O or -i option is given, gramps will launch its main window and start the usual interactive session with the empty database, since there is no data to process, anyway.

If no -o or -a options are given, gramps will launch its main window and start the usual interactive session with the database resulted from all imports. This database resides in the import_db.grdb under ~/.gramps/import directory.

The error encountered during import, export, or action, will be either dumped to stdout (if these are exceptions handled by gramps) or or to stderr (if these are not handled). Use usual shell redirections of stdout and stderr to save messages and errors in files.

To import four databases (whose formats can be determined from their names) and then check the resulting database for errors, one may type:

gramps -i file1.ged -i file2.tgz -i ~/db3.gramps -i file4.wft -a check

To explicitly specify the formats in the above example, append filenames with appropriate -f options:

gramps -i file1.ged -f gedcom -i file2.tgz -f gramps-pkg -i ~/db3.gramps -f gramps-xml -i file4.wft -f wft -a check

To record the database resulting from all imports, supply -o flag (use -f if the filename does not allow gramps to guess the format):

gramps -i file1.ged -i file2.tgz -o ~/new-package -f gramps-pkg

To import three databases and start interactive gramps session with the result:

gramps -i file1.ged -i file2.tgz -i ~/db3.gramps

Finally, to start normal interactive session type:

gramps

In addition to generating direct printer output, report generators also target other systems, such as OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, HTML, or LaTeX to allow the users to modify the format to suit their needs.

${PREFIX}/bin/gramps ${PREFIX}/share/gramps ${HOME}/.gramps