Wrapper for NCL interpreter providing simplified passing of parameters

Hi all,

we have a number of NCL applications that require passing of parameters
to NCL. As this must be done using NCL syntax, quite some quoting of
double-quotes and parens is needed to get things running.

To ease the pain, I've written a wrapper script for the ncl command,
called nclsh. This takes command line options in a Unix-like manner,
converts them to NCL syntax and passes them as variables assignments to
your system-provided ncl. Using this, you may eg write

     nclsh plot.ncl -verbose -format=pdf -vars=slp,sst

which would then internally get translated to something like

     ncl plot.ncl verbose=True format='"pdf"' vars='(/"slp","sst"/)'

More details are explained in the 'nclsh.pdf' attached to this email.

I got some positive feedback from our lot, so I thought that maybe you
folks would like this, too.

All you should need is attached. Just put the 'nclsh' where the shell
can find it, and make sure it is executable. perl and ncl are assumed to
be somewhere in the shell's search path (but they usually are). If you
are really conscientious, there's also that 'nclsh.man' man page to be
put where 'man' can find it.

As for the technicalities, the script is written using Perl (no
apologies there), and is Unix only (though Cygwin or MinGW/MSYS may help)

Have a try and, of course, your feedback is most welcome!

Cheers,
Karl

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