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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 >