There are two Perl APIs for NetCDF:

• PDL::NetCDF, an object-oriented interface between NetCDF files and PDL objects.
• NetCDFPerl, developed at Unidata, but now in maintenance mode only, and no further development is currently planned.

• To use PERL for working with NetCDF data.
• To exploit the strengths of the PDL::NetCDF:
  • Newer, based on NetCDF-4.
  • Uses PDL (the Perl Data Language) with capabilities similar to Matlab and IDL.
  • Installation is straightforward.
  • perldl, a simple interactive shell for PDL, is available for interactive prototyping of scripts.
  • Fast when dealing with large multidimensional arrays.
• To exploit the strengths of the NetCDFPerl:
  • Installation on RedHat systems easy from RPMs.
  • The NetCDFPerl documentation is fairly complete.
  • The ncmanipulate package is available for modifying the schema of a NetCDF file (adding, deleting, or renaming dimensions, variables, and attributes).

• Write a two-dimensional array of sample data and read data from this file.
• Write some variables with units attributes and coordinate dimensions and read data variables and attributes from this file.
• Write some four-dimensional variables using a record dimension and read from the variables from this file.