2 Command Line Tools

The main product delivered by ESMF is the ESMF library that allows application developers to write programs based on the ESMF API. In addition to the programming library, ESMF distributions come with a small set of command line tools (CLT) that are of general interest to the community. These CLTs utilize the ESMF library to implement features such as printing general information about the ESMF installation, or generating regrid weight files. The provided ESMF CLTs are intended to be used as standard command line tools.

The bundled ESMF CLTs 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 installation, the CLTs 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 CLTs in more detail in section "Using Bundled ESMF Command Line Tools".

The following sections provide in-depth documentation of the bundled ESMF CLTs. In addition, each tool supports the standard --help command line argument, providing a brief description of how to invoke the program.