ncdump produces a human-readable text representation of a netCDF file (CDL or NcML). It has lots of options.
ncdump [-c|-h] [-v ...] [[-b|-f] [c|f]] [-l len] [-n name]
[-p n[,n]] [-x] [-k] [-s] [-t] file
[-c] Coordinate variable data and header information
[-h] Header information only, no data
[-v var1[,...]] Data for variable(s) var1,... only
[-b [c|f]] Brief annotations for C or Fortran indices in data
[-f [c|f]] Full annotations for C or Fortran indices in data
[-l len] Line length maximum in data section (default 80)
[-n name] Name for netCDF (default derived from file name)
[-p n[,n]] Display floating-point values with less precision
[-k] Output kind of netCDF file
[-x] Output XML (NcML) instead of CDL
[-s] Output special (virtual) attributes
[-t] Output time data as ISO date-time strings
file Name of netCDF file