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nailpolish summary

Quickly review the quality and duplicate rate of the dataset. The reads must first have been indexed.

Usage

$ nailpolish summary --help
Generate a summary of duplicate statistics from an index file

Usage: nailpolish summary [OPTIONS] <INPUT>

Arguments:
  <INPUT>  Input .fastq file

Options:
  -o, --output <OUTPUT>  Output .html file. By default, will write to <file>.summary.html
  -h, --help             Print help

Output

A brief summary of the dataset is printed to the terminal:

[16:17:49] nailpolish v0.2.2, commit #65a177c-modified
[16:17:49] CMD: ../target/release/nailpolish summary scmixology2_sample.fastq
[16:17:49] Summarising scmixology2_sample.fastq → scmixology2_sample.summary.html
[16:17:49] Summary written to scmixology2_sample.summary.html. In brief:
[16:17:49]   Nailpolish version:        nailpolish v0.2.2, commit #65a177c-modified
[16:17:49]   File path:                 scmixology2_sample.fastq
[16:17:49]   Dataset size:              28.9 MB
[16:17:49]   Index date:                2026-08-13T16:17:08.927358+10:00
[16:17:49]   Total read count:          14,143
[16:17:49]   Reads with barcodes:       14,143
[16:17:49]   Reads without barcodes:    0
[16:17:49]   Singleton groups:          10,855
[16:17:49]   Duplicate groups:          1,310   (3,288 reads)
[16:17:49]   Average quality:           21.2
[16:17:49]   Average length:            1030.6

Total read count is every read in the file: those which were indexed under a barcode, plus those which had no barcode and were skipped. Reads without barcodes are only possible if the index was built with --skip-unmatched — without that flag, nailpolish index errors on the first read it cannot match.

Singleton groups and Duplicate groups split the indexed groups by size: groups with a single read, and groups with two or more reads (along with the total number of reads in them). These are the counts before consensus calling — nailpolish consensus reports them again after false-duplicate detection, which splits some duplicate groups into smaller groups and singletons.

The full report, including the distribution of duplicate group sizes, is written to the HTML file.

See an example summary output file.