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John, Either of the following command invocations work to show ways to handle special characters in variable names: ncdump -v 'xma/rtip mon 1' obv01.nc > tmp.cdl ncdump -v xma/rtip\ mon\ 1 obv01.nc > tmp.cdl Those are Unix shell syntax, so how to escape special characters to the shell would depend on operating system and perhaps shell used. What's a little non-intuitive is that some special characters that must be escaped in CDL, such as ":", don't need to be escaped in the shell, but it doesn't hurt to escape them, so any of the following should work for a variable named "abc:def": ncdump -v abc:def ncdump -v abc\:def ncdump 'abc:def' --Russ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: HKX-214469 Department: Support netCDF Priority: High Status: Closed