Hi Carline,

-force means overwrite the results of a previous analysis. In this case it means that the subject directory was created by running recon-all before, and it's checking to make sure that you know you are running with an existing subject dir, not creating a new one.

cheers, Bruce

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Carline van der Pol wrote:

Hi,

I am trying to convert .nii file into .mgz file. However, I use this command:

recon-all -i <dir/file.nii> -s <dir>

But I get the message: ERROR: ...exists, delete or re-run with -force.

So, I re-ran it with -force, and it worked. However, my question is:

• what exactly is the function of the force command?

And also I read somewhere in the presentations about FreeSurfer, that one has to be careful with nifti (.nii) files. But why do we have to be careful?

Thanks,

Carline