Tim,
My understanding is that you are required to use a record number to read
records serially using the Netcdf API. There is no such function to read
records anonymously until end of file. I think you are trying to cross
over a record processing paradigm into a subscript oriented interface.
The conventional way do do what you ask is to do the work, use a few
inquire functions to get the current dimension size on the unlimited
dimension. Then each process reads records and increments their own
"record index number" until the dimension size is surpassed. This is
equivalent to detecting end of file.
I suppose one could blindly keep incrementing the record index until one of
the get_var calls returns an error code. It would probably be the specific
code for "requested subscripts exceed the extent of the file", or however
that's worded. See the table of error codes in the user manual or include
or header files.
When the dimension is unlimited, I am not even sure that that would always
be a reliable test.
There is a certain elegance to avoiding error returns when you have the
information to do so. That would be my preference.
--Dave
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 7:46 PM, Timothy Stitt <Timothy.Stitt.9@xxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I was just wondering if there is any easy to detect the EOF of a netcdf-4
data file? I’m trying to read in records (with an unlimited leading
dimension) in parallel until there are no more records left. Is there any
easy way to implement this without explicitly calculating the number of
records (with an inquiry function) and dividing by the #MPI processes (and
figuring out what happens when there isn’t a simple division)?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tim.
