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In this tutorial topic, the command-line tools will be discussed.
Obtain Tools and Files (Optional)
You can obtain pre-built utilities for Linux and Windows from the right column of the table at the bottom of the Obtaining the Latest HDF5 Software page.
HDF5 files can be obtained from various places such as the HDF5 Examples pages and HDF-EOS and Tools and Information Center. Specifically, these examples are used in this tutorial topic:
- HDF5 Files created from compiling the HDF5 Introductory Examples
- HDF5 Files on the C Examples by API page
- NPP JPSS files, SVM01_npp.. (gzipped) and SVM09_npp.. (gzipped)
- HDF-EOS OMI-Aura file
Tutorial Topics
A variety of command-line tools are included in the HDF5 binary distribution. There are tools to view, edit, convert and compare HDF5 files. This tutorial discusses the tools by their functionality. It does not cover all of the HDF5 tools.
| Tool Category | Topic | Tools Used |
| View | File Content and Structure | h5dump and h5ls |
| Datasets and Properties | h5dump and h5ls | |
| Groups | h5dump and h5ls | |
| Attributes | h5dump | |
| Dataset Subset | h5dump | |
| Datatypes | h5dump | |
| Edit | Remove Inaccessible Objects/Unused Space in a File | h5repack |
| Change a Dataset's Storage Layout | h5repack | |
| Apply Compression Filter to a Dataset | h5repack | |
| Copy Objects to Another File | h5copy | |
| Add or Remove User Block from File | h5jam and h5unjam | |
| Convert | Output HDF5 Dataset into an ASCII File | h5dump |
| Output HDF5 Dataset into Binary File | h5dump | |
| Export from h5dump and Import into HDF5 | h5dump and h5import |
- - Last modified: 21 December 2016