Atro, I've always wanted to go to Helsinki. It's got a very exotic sound to me. Do you like it there? You problem with nctest on Irix is puzzling. On my Irix, everything works. And my two datafiles are the same length: bash-2.05b$ ls -l testfile.nc testfile_nc.sav -rw-r--r-- 1 ed ustaff 43392 Aug 25 06:04 testfile.nc -rw-r--r-- 1 ed ustaff 43392 Apr 30 1996 testfile_nc.sav Here's my system info: bash-2.05b$ uname -a IRIX64 flip 6.5 01062343 IP30 mips My compiler info: MIPSpro Compilers: Version 7.4.3m Can you try the latest beta release? Get the beta at: ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/netcdf-beta.tar.gz If that doesn't work, can you send me the two data files and let me take a look? Thanks, Ed -- Ed Hartnett -- address@hidden