The main product delivered by ESMF is the ESMF library that allows application developers to write programs based on the ESMF Fortran or C APIs. In addition to the programming library, ESMF distributions come with a small set of applications that are of general interest to the community. These applications utilize the ESMF library to implement features such as printing general information about the ESMF installation, or generating regrid weight files. The provided ESMF applications are intended to be used as standard command line tools.
The bundled ESMF applications are built and installed during the usual ESMF installation process, which is described in detail in the ESMF User's Guide section "Building and Installing the ESMF". After the installation the applications will be located in the ESMF_APPSDIR directory, which can be found as a Makefile variable in the esmf.mk file. The esmf.mk file can be found in the ESMF_INSTALL_LIBDIR directory after a successful installation. The ESMF User's Guide discusses the esmf.mk mechanism to access the bundled applications in more detail in section "Using Bundled ESMF Applications".
Refer to the "Application" section of the ESMF Fortran reference manual
for more information. In addition, each application supports the standard
--help command line argument, providing a brief description of
how to invoke the program.