ncatted not honoring pre-existing history global attribute about nco HOT 4 CLOSED

This is by design. A feature not a bug, I hope. ncatted follows the NCO manual for generating its own history. And when you specifically tell it to append to 'history' not 'History' it does what you tell it to do. So try changing your command above to
ncatted -h -a "History","global",a,c,"ncrcat file_1.nc file_2.nc -o outfile.nc\n" outfile.nc

from nco.

Thank you for the clarification. Appending to 'History' does indeed add the text to the correct entry and I understand better why ncatted handles it this way when appending an attribute. One thing that would be useful when using ncatted to modify the history global attribute is the ability to insert at the beginning much like what the other operators do but that is really a feature request and not a problem.

Thank you for the help and thank you for continuing to develop this most excellent product!

from nco.

A prepend mode seems like a good idea. I'll add it to the wishlist for 5.0.6.

from nco.

FYI prepend mode was easy to add, and you can now try it in ncatted in newly released NCO 5.0.5. From the release notes:

C. ncatted has a new edit mode: Prepend. Analogous to append mode,
prepend mode will prepend the user-specified value to the attribute
and if the attribute does not exist it will be created:

ncatted -a char_att,att_var,p,c,"this is prepended.\n" in.nc out.nc

http://nco.sf.net/nco.html#att_prepend

Feedback welcome!

from nco.