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/software/netcdffan_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/software/netcdfsoftware.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).
