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fbinnumrec

Returns the number of unformatted sequential Fortran records in a binary file.

Prototype

	function fbinnumrec (
		path [1] : string   
	)

	return_val [1] :  integer

Arguments

path

Pathname of file

Description

This function returns the number of records in a Fortran unformatted sequential binary file.

It was updated in version 4.3.0 in order to allow reads into files bigger than 2 GB. This change allows you to access records that occur past the 2 GB point in the file, but not to read into variables that would be larger than 2 GB.

Caveat: we've run across binary files that were written with 8-byte record markers. This function may expect them to be 4-bytes; it just depends on what system NCL was compiled on.

This happens if the Fortran program that created the binary file was compiled with a version of "g77" or "gfortran" that sets the marker size to whatever "off_t" is on that system.

In V6.1.1 and later, you can change this to 8 bytes using the "RecordMarkerSize" option in the setfileoption procedure.

As a work-around for older versions of NCL, you can recompile the code that created the binary file with the option "-frecord-marker=4" to force a 4-byte record, and run the code again to regenerate the file.

See Also

setfileoption, isbigendian, fbindirread

Examples

Example 1

Determine the number of records on a file created opening the file via the Fortran statement: open(10, "foo.binary", form="unformatted")

   nrec = fbinnumrec("foo.binary")   ; nrec is scalar integer