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Re: 950418: Help Find Utility

> >Keywords: 199504190205.AA04460

Hi Richard,

> I have downloaded some files to my Mac computer and they are encoded in CDF
> format. My problem is that I don't have a utility to translate these files to
> text that I can read. I looked around your FTP site and I could not find what
> I needed. I would appreciate it if you could tell me if such a utility
> exists, and secondly where it can be found. 
> I am new to computing, so please give me information in words  of one
> syllable. Any help you can give me will be really appreciated, it has taken a
> long time for me to find the files that I can't translate, and it's very
> frustrating not to be able to read them. 

If the files are in CDF format rather than netCDF format, I can't help
you--that is NASA's format, which is different from our netCDF.  You can
find out what's available for NASA CDF format from the information I've
appended to this message about CDF.

If your files are in netCDF format, you want to use the utility called
"ncdump" that translates netCDF binary data to an ASCII text form.  That's
one part of our netCDF package that you can get in source form and build
with a C compiler.  We also have it available in binary form for a few
platforms.  I've also appended information about where to get netCDF, if
you decide you need it.

______________________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                           UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                              http://www.unidata.ucar.edu

____________________________________________________________________________
CDF

CDF (Common Data Format) is a library and toolkit for storing, manipulating,
and accessing multi-dimensional data sets. The basic component of CDF is a
software programming interface that is a device independent view of the CDF
data model.

A user's guide and software are on ftp://nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov/cdf.dir/for
VMS and ftp://ncgl.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/cdf/for all others.

Some general information on CDF, including a FAQ, is available from
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cdf/cdf_home.html.

A recent paper for CDF is available from ftp://ncgl.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/cdf/
doc/papers/CDF-nssdc.ps.Z.

A mailing list, address@hidden, exists for discussion of
CDF. To subscribe, please send email to "address@hidden" with
the command "SUBSCRIBE cdf-users" in the body of your message.

Questions can be directed to address@hidden.

A client-server software layer called CSCDF, which can be used with the CDF
library to provide applications access to remote CDF datasets, can be
obtained from its author, Hillel Steinberg, by email at address@hidden.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
netCDF

NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is an interface for scientific data access
which implements a machine-independent, self-describing, extendible file
format. All netCDF information is available via the WWW site
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/.

Source code and documentation for the netCDF data access library is
available from ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/netcdf.tar.Z.

A FAQ is available from http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/faq.html
or in text from ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/FAQ.

Past netCDF support inquiries have been archived and can be searched from
gopher://groucho.unidata.ucar.edu/7waissrc%3a/systems/netcdf/unidata-support-netcdf.src.

The netCDF User's Guide is available as a hypertext (HTML) document from
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/guide.txn_toc.html, in
compressed PostScript at ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/guide.ps.Z,
or in source form with the netCDF source distribution.

A recent paper (Jenter and Signell, 1992) which provides a good introduction
to netCDF is available as ftp://crusty.er.usgs.gov/pub/netcdf.asce.ps.

A visual browser for netCDF format data files is available from
ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/contrib/ncview.tar.Z.

A mailing list, address@hidden, exists for discussion of the
netCDF interface, and for announcements of netCDF news: to subscribe, send a
message to address@hidden containing the line: "subscribe
netcdfgroup". The archives of netcdfgroup are available from
ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/mail-archives/netcdfgroup,and can be searched at
wais://wais.unidata.ucar.edu:210/netcdf-group.src.

For more information, contact address@hidden.