Hi,
As first reported by Mario Emmenlauer, there is a bug in netCDF-3.6.2
(and earlier versions) in the code for creating byte and short type
variables greater than 4 GiB in size.
This problem resulted in an assertion violation or arithmetic exception
that would have caused a program to halt, rather than writing bad data
or corrupting existing data.
A fix is available as a patch to the file libsrc/var.c in the
netcdf-3.6.2 distribution from
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/patches/large-vars-362-patch
The bug is also fixed in the latest snapshot release, available from:
ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/snapshot/netcdf-daily.tar.gz
Here's a detailed description of the symptoms:
1. On 32-bit platforms (with size_t an unsigned 32-bit type):
* For a short variable, if the product of dimensions (not counting
the record dimension, if any) is greater than 2**31 (that's
2,147,483,648), the following assertion violation occurs:
Assertion failed: remaining > 0, file putget.c, line 347
* For any type of variable, if the product of dimensions (not
counting the record dimension, if any) is exactly 2**32 (that's
4,294,967,296) or any multiple of 2**32, an integer divide by zero
occurs.
2. On 64-bit platforms (with size_t an unsigned 64-bit type):
* For a byte variable, if the product of dimensions (not counting the
record dimension, if any) is greater than 2**32, an assertion
violation occurs:
Assertion failed: *ulp <= X_SIZE_MAX, file ncx.c, line 1810
* For a short variable, if the product of dimensions (not counting
the record dimension, if any) is greater than 2**31, the same
assertion violation occurs:
Assertion failed: *ulp <= X_SIZE_MAX, file ncx.c, line 1810
The information in this email is also available on the web site "Known
Problems with the NetCDF Distributions" at
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/known_problems.html
--Russ
_____________________________________________________________________
Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program
russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.unidata.ucar.edu
