20000707: DCHRLY Decoder

James,

GEMPAK deals in 1 case since the early VMS systems only allowed that.
When invboking the decoder from the ldm, you should be able to
use the relative path to data/gempak/surface if you have that
path under LDM, so you can avoid your WarmTop path.

Typically, you would find that if you named the file
YYYYMMDD_SAO.GEM, you should get the output file
as YYYYMMDD_sao.gem. However, when the paths to the
tables are not convertible, you would have trouble.

The basics of DC decoders are described in Chapter 5 of the user guide...
dchrly will become dcmetr in GEMPAK 5.5

Steve Chiswell
Unidata User Support


>From: James T Brown <address@hidden>
>Organization: UCAR/Unidata
>Keywords: 200007072322.e67NMJT14989

>Unidata Support:
>
>I am wondering if there is some strange requirement 
>with the "dchrly" decoder where caps are not allowed
>in the output file name?  My original entry in the
>"pqact.conf" file was similar to the following:
>
>DDS|IDS        ^S[AP].* .... ([0-3][0-9])([0-2][0-9])
>       PIPE    -close /soft/nawips/bin/sol/dchrly
>               -v 0 -b 9 -m 24
>               -d /data/WarmTop/archive/logs/dchrly.log
>               -p /soft/nawips/gempak5.4/tables/pack/hrly.pack
>               -s /soft/nawips/gempak5.4/tables/stns/sfmetar_sa.tbl
>               /data/WarmTop/archive/surface/YYYYMMDD_sao.gem
>
>
>The logfile was always created, but the actual "*_sao.gem"
>output file was not.  Changing the string "WarmTop" to
>"warmtop" in the above example seems to have corrected 
>the problem.
>
>I also ran a couple of simpler tests using raw data 
>and running dchrly from the command-line:
>
>   dchrly out.gem < test.raw   (creates output)
>   dchrly Out.gem < test.raw   (does not)
>
>   dchrly new.gem < test.raw   (creates output)
>   dchrly neW.gem < test.raw   (does not)
>
>Maybe it is just getting late in the day and I overlooked
>something else, but restricting to all lowercase letters
>for the output file name seems a bit odd.  I also didn't
>see mention of this in the help file:
>
>   $GEMPAKHOME/help/dchrly.hlp
>
>In fact, the help file seems a bit lacking.  There are
>no descriptions of the various command-line options.
>Are there more thorough "man pages" or documentation
>available for some of these decoders?
>
>Many thanks.
>
>Jim
>
>-- 
>==========================================================
>James T. Brown   
>UNIX Systems Administrator
>Geography/Fisheries & Wildlife
>Michigan State University
>
>email: address@hidden
>