5 NetCDF Utilities
One of the primary reasons for using the netCDF interface for
applications that deal with arrays is to take advantage of
higher-level netCDF utilities and generic applications for netCDF
data. Currently three netCDF utilities are available as part of the
netCDF software distribution:
ncdump- reads a netCDF dataset and prints a textual representation of
the information in the dataset
ncgen- reads a textual representation of a netCDF dataset and generates
the corresponding binary netCDF file or a program to
create the netCDF dataset
nccopy- reads a netCDF dataset using the netCDF programming interface and
copies it, optionally to a different kind of netCDF dataset, and
optionally with compression or chunking
Users have contributed other netCDF utilities, and various
visualization and analysis packages are available that access netCDF
data. For an up-to-date list of freely-available and commercial
software that can access or manipulate netCDF data, see the netCDF
Software list,
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/netcdf/software.html.
This chapter describes the ncgen, ncdump, and nccopy utilities. These
tools convert between binary netCDF datasets and a text representation
of netCDF datasets, or between netCDF data format variants. The output
of ncdump and the input to ncgen is a text description of a netCDF
dataset in a tiny language known as CDL (network Common data form
Description Language).
