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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/ncgen4
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
nccopy
reads a netCDF dataset using the netCDF programming interface and copies it, optionally to a different kind of netCDF dataset

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, ncgen4, and ncdump utilities. These three 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).