How to programmatically (i.e., without no or minimal handcoding) copy a netCDF file? (Without calling
> system("cp whatever wherever") :-) Why I ask: I need to "do surgery" on a large netCDF file (technically an I/O API file which uses netCDF). My group believes a data-assimilation error caused a data variable to be corrupted in a certain way, so I'm going to "decorrupt" it so we can compare values with the raw data. Thanks to help from this list, * I understand that, generally, R wants value semantics (though mechanisms like package=proto allow reference semantics). Therefore, ISTM, rather than attempting to modify a (copy of a) file in-place, I should instead [copy the bits I want to keep from the source file to the new/target file, read the one data variable I want to modify from the source file, write the one modified datavar to the target file]. (Please correct me if wrong!) * I have a routine that (I believe) does the desired modification of the one datavar. And from reading `help(*ncdf)` and http://www.image.ucar.edu/Software/Netcdf/ I believe (ICBW :-) I understand the definition, get, and put steps that are involved in reading and writing netCDF. However, * the file I'm working with is large and complex * the examples above hand-craft their output files So I'm wondering, can anyone point me to, or provide, code that copies a netCDF file both * completely: all coordinate variables, all data variables and their attributes, and all global attributes, such that $ diff -wB <( ncdump -h source.nc ) <( ncdump -h target.nc ) | wc -l 0 * programmatically: no or minimal hand-coding of, e.g., attribute names and values, missing-value value. ? If not, can this be done in principle, or are there steps that must (at least currently) necessarily be hand-coded? TIA, Tom Roche <tom_ro...@pobox.com> ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.