Hi there!
Hopefully this does not stray too far away from the bioinformatical side of the site...
Question:
I'm saving my local blast databases on an external hard drive. When trying to run analysis against these databases, I'm constantly forced to give the absolute path as my database argument instead of simply the name of the database.
I know the issues lies in the exported BLASTDB environmental variable, however I can't for the life of me figure out how to structure the path!
Currently, it looks like this in my .bash_profile file:
export BLASTDB="/media/<username>/<Drive name>/<Subfolders>/external_blast_dbs"
This does not work however, as I keep getting an error that the database can not be found (states that it can't find the database relative to my current working directory...). Google searches never mention how to structure the path when it comes to external hard drives...
How the heck do you get it to recognize the database outside of my home directory?
Thank you in advance.
Did you make sure that there are no spaces in any of the names in that path? If there are then remove them (replace with an "_") and try. You could try and escape them but the former option is cleaner.
No spaces present!
I kind of feel like an idiot for asking, but have you sourced
.bash_profile?Then that makes me an even bigger idiot for not trying it yet. Alas, it did not fix it, but I think it not being sourced contributed to the issue... Now it's at least showing up in the path where it states it cannot find the database:
Edit:
It works! I missed a
/in the final try.source .bash_profileand a correct path fixed the problem!That's great! Glad it worked out!
Post your comment as an answer and i'll mark it as the correct one for future viewers!
Source your
.bash_profilekids!You are brave to be using an external drive to hold your blast database. Hopefully the database is small (or you are using a thunderbolt drive) :-)