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 two 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 C or FORTRAN program to
create the netCDF dataset
Two more general-purpose netCDF utilities are available as part of the
FAN (File Array Notation) package:
ncmeta prints selected metadata from one or more netCDF datasets
ncrob performs various operations (copy, sum, mean, max, min, ...)
with data read from and printed or written to text files and/or
selected parts of netCDF variables or attributes.
For more information on FAN, see
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/fan_utils.html.
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/packages/netcdf/software.html.
This chapter describes the ncgen and ncdump utilities. These two tools
convert between binary netCDF datasets and a text representation of
netCDF datasets. 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).
