From: harish vashisth (harish.vashisth_at_gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 08 2012 - 12:49:18 CDT

Hi Nate,
I think you can load your pdb and query "chain" for a particular atom
selection..

For example:
# In this case the script finds chain names for all Ca atoms

mol new myfile.pdb
set sel [atomselect top "protein and name CA"]
$sel get chain

exit

I think it should work...you can make other atom selections to find
corresponding chains..look at the following page for what else you can
query for atom-selections

http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.7/ug/node79.html#table:ug:keywords

Regards,
-Harish

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Nate Hurley <natech_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm new to VMD as of this week, and I'm trying to write a script that
> needs to determine how many chains exist in a pdb file. In each of my
> files there is a chain A, and then there are somewhere between 5 and 20
> chains Z, Y, X, . . . . Is there a way that I can easily find how many
> chains I have?
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> -Nate Hurley
>