[McIDAS #MOR-174854]: May I ask three questions about how to use the command AXFORM to generate multiple files from McIDAS .area data? Thanks a lot.

Hi Kun,

re:
> I have a full month of meteosat-5 .area data in June 2000. The latitudinal
> and longitudinal coverage of these data sets are: (20N~35N, 69E~92E).
> Attached is a sample data which is named as met5_8_2000_153_0000.area.
> Now, I want to use the command of AXFORM to create 153_0000.A01,
> 153_0000.ALN, 153_0000.ALT, as well as 153_0000.HDR from it.
> 
> Question 1: I guess if I input the command below, I will get 153_0000.A01,
> 153_0000.ALN and 153_0000.ALT, right?
> 
> AXFORM met5_8_2000_153_0000.area 153_0000 FTYPE=ASC NAV=YES

This will produce the files:

153_0000.A01
153_0000.ALN
153_0000.ALT
153_0000.HDR

> Question 2: How to generate 153_0000.HDR?

the .HDR file will be produced with the AXFORM invocation you show above.

> Question 3: Totally, I have 720 .area data sets from June 1, 2000 throughout
> June 30, 2000, which is named as: met5_8_2000_153_0000.area,
> met5_8_2000_153_0100.area, met5_8_2000_153_0200.area, and so on.
> Now, my question is: What's the fastest way to generate the .A01, .ALN, .ALT 
> and
> .HDR files from each .area data? I mean, if I use the entry above, I can
> only make the generation one by one and that will be very slow. Do I
> have any method so that I could let the McIDAS to complete this operation
> for the entire month of June 2000 automatically?

There is no single command in McIDAS that will work through all 720 files you
have and produce the the output you want for each file.

You will need to write a script that works on each file individually.  You
have several options at this point since you can write scripts using a
variety of scripting languages: Bourne shell script, C shell script, Tcl,
Perl, etc.  You could also use the MCBASI programming language to write
the script.  Whatever scripting language you use, you will be forced to
learn how to program in that scripting language.

If this is a one time effort, the absolute simplies way is to simply create
a McIDAS BATCH file that has an AXFORM command for each file you want
to convert.  Something like:

CONVERT.BAT:

met5_8_2000_153_0100.area
AXFORM met5_8_2000_153_0000.area 153_0000 FTYPE=ASC NAV=YES
AXFORM met5_8_2000_153_0100.area 153_0100 FTYPE=ASC NAV=YES
AXFORM met5_8_2000_153_0200.area 153_0200 FTYPE=ASC NAV=YES
AXFORM met5_8_2000_153_0300.area 153_0300 FTYPE=ASC NAV=YES
AXFORM met5_8_2000_153_0400.area 153_0400 FTYPE=ASC NAV=YES
 ...

You would then run the command using:

BATCH CONTINUE=YES "CONVERT.BAT

This is not pretty or elegant, but you can create the file using a simple
text editor very quickly, and you would not have to learn how to program
in any particular scripting language.

Form additional help on McIDAS commands you can use the help built into
McIDAS.  For example:

HELP BATCH

Or, you can look through the Unidata McIDAS-X Users Guide:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/mcidas/2006/users_guide/toc.html

> I am looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much.

No worries.

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: MOR-174854
Department: Support McIDAS
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed