I've committed a change to both the daily build and the 1.6 release candidate that will cause the "sel" command to treat your old selectors as wanting to do atom selection rather than model activation (namely, if the argument to the "sel" commands contains any characters that are illegal in the model-activation mode [anything but dash, comma, period or digits] then it will try to do atom selection).

On Jan 31, 2012, at 1:34 PM, frederick lee wrote:

hi elaine,
thanks for the quick help. i tried using aliases just now.
now i have 4 aliases: g0a, g0b, g1a, g1b.

i can only sel all 4 groups by using
sel g0a | g0b | g1a | g1b

the & operator returns nothing as there are
no intersection among the 4 groups.

Right. You said "and" in your original mail and in English that can be ambiguous whether that corresponds to "and" or "or" in boolean logic. As you figured out, you actually wanted the boolean or ("|").

seemed the & is intersection and not plus here.
when i used
sel g0a,g0b,g1a,g1b
i got error.

given above, seemed like i need to do something like
sel (g0a | g0b | g1a | g1b) & without CA/C1'
but parentheses are not legal here. how should i get
around this? thanks again.

For a complication selection like this it's probably easiest to do it in two steps:

sel g0a | g0b | g1a | g1b ; sel sel & without CA/C1'

--Eric

Eric Pettersen

UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu