Its main use is therefore to split a file containing multiple sequences into many files, each containing one sequence.
The names of the files it creates are derived from the ID name of the sequence, followed by an extension denoting the format of the sequence. You have no control over the names of the files it writes out.
For example, if the files embl:hsfa11* are read in and the output is specified as wibble.seq, then the following files are expected to be created:
hsfa110.fasta hsfa111.fasta hsfa112.fasta hsfa113.fasta hsfa114.fasta
(No file wibble.seq is created.)
Why would you want to split a multiple sequence file into many individual files?
EMBOSS programs can read in many sequences from one file where this is sensible. Sometimes EMBOSS programs can only read in one sequence at a time because that is the sensible way to do things, but your sequence is one sequence of many in a file. You can specify that sequence using the USA filename:sequenceID, but you may still feel more comfortable splitting your sequences up into many files first.
Many non-EMBOSS programs will also have restrictions on whether they can read in multiple sequence files or not.
The specification of the output file is not used in this case.
At some point this ought to change and you will not be prompted for the output file at all.
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One file for each input sequence is written out.
The names of the files it creates are derived from the ID name of the sequence, followed by an extension denoting the format of the sequence. You have no control over the names of the files it writes out.
For example, if the files embl:hsfa11* are read in and the output is specified as wibble.seq, then the following files are expected to be created:
hsfa110.fasta hsfa111.fasta hsfa112.fasta hsfa113.fasta hsfa114.fasta
(No file wibble.seq is created.)
This isa side effect of the waysequence output works in EMBOSS. Writing multiple sequences to separate files (the -ossingle qualifier) does this, and seqretsplit has set it automatically on.