NetCDF 4.2.1.1 Release

The Unidata netCDF group announces the 4.2.1.1 release of the netCDF C libraries. Version 4.2.1.1 includes fixes for two problems found in version 4.2.1 that we regarded as serious enough to warrant this interim release:

• A DAP performance bug in remotely accessing large files (> 2GiB) that also results in an incorrect error message on close
• An ncdump bug in CDL output for netCDF-4 string data containing characters that need to be escaped (e.g. newlines, tabs, quotes)

Detailed information about the release is availalble in the Release Notes.

Source code and documentation are available from the NetCDF Distributions page.

We recommend installing this release.

As an example of the problem it fixes, in version 4.2.1 the command

ncdump -v lat https://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov:9090/dods/gfs_hd/gfs_hd20120801/gfs_hd_00z

did not complete after 10 minutes on a desktop machine at the Unidata Program Center. With the fix in 4.2.1.1, it completes in less than a second. If you see similar performance problems with DAP access to large remote files, install this release!