How do I blast against a specific portion of the nr database?

[Arthis]

I would like to blast my sequences against the swissprot database, using local blast. For the purpose of downstream applications, I would like to do this using the copy of the swissprot database from the NCBI's ftp site, not the version from swissprot's own website.

The NCBI version comes as some very tiny files, accompanied with this message:

Certain databases are subsets of a larger parental database. For those
databases, alias and mask files, rather than actual databases, are provided.
The mask file needs the parent database to function properly. The parent
databases should be generated on the same day as the mask file. For
example, to use swissprot pre-formatted database, swissprot.tar.gz, one
will need to get the nr.tar.gz with the same date stamp.

I have both the nr database and swissprot files, with matching date stamps, downloaded and extracted. How do I now blast against the swissprot database? If I try to blast against swissprot as if it were a normal database, it tells me it cannot find 'swissprot.pin'. I have also gone through the help files from my blast executable (blastall 2.2.18) and see no parameters for mask or alias files.

[lindenb]

cross posted: https://www.biostars.org/p/100407

[Arthis]

Problem solved. The solution was to just update from the aged blastall executable being used on our server to the lastest blast+. Once I did that I could set the -db as swissprot and it all out itself.