2012 Unidata NetCDF Workshop > Developing generic netCDF software
25.1 Of what use is a utility to copy netCDF files?
There are already utility programs to copy files, for example the Unix
"cp" command.
Are there good reasons to develop a copy command that only uses the
netCDF APIs rather than POSIX I/O?
- If the netCDF APIs are adequate to copy any netCDF file, it proves
they are complete with respect to the netCDF
data model
- For simple, flat classic model files, it's plausible that the
netCDF-3 classic APIs
are complete in this sense
- When the netCDF-4 enhanced data model was first presented, there was
skepticism whether its complexity made such a
copy program impractical or inefficient because:
- groups, as containers for other netCDF objects, can be nested
arbitrarily deeply
- nested compound types and variable-length types result in an
arbitrarily large variety of user-defined types
An interesting question is: How much more code is needed to
copy any enhanced-model netCDF-4 file than any classic model netCDF-3
file? This would be one measure of the relative complexity of the data models.
2012 Unidata NetCDF Workshop > Developing generic netCDF software