HDFCOMP(1)

💖 HDFCOMP(1) — it's giving "compress my rasters, bestie" 💖

okay so real talk, this is a page from the General Commands Manual (section 1, the cool section) and the command is called hdfcomp. say it with me: h-d-f-comp. it's short for HDF compress, because we're not doing mystery here. 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

hdfcomp — compress 8-bit raster images in an HDF file 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

hdfcomp output-filename [-c|-r|-i] input-filename-1 [-c|-r|-i] input-
       filename-2...

yes the line wraps like that, she's a long girl, we love her anyway. 💅

💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

okay so here's the vibe: hdfcomp reads RIS8 images out of a whole set of HDF files, compresses them, and then stores all that compressed data into a second HDF file. that second file is your output-filename.

and here's the cute part — if the output HDF file already exists? no problem, no drama, the compressed images just get appended to it. she adds, she doesn't replace. 🫶

🔥 OPTIONS 🔥

• -r — No Compression. literally just don't compress the output data at all. this one is the default, so if you're like "wait what happens if I pick nothing," you picked this. 🙈
• -c — Run length coding.</c> compress the output data using run-length encoding. runs get run-length encoded, that's the whole thing. ⭐
• -i — IMCOMP Compression. compress the output data using the IMCOMP method. that's her name, IMCOMP, iconic. 👑

ngl, you can sprinkle these flags between input files in the synopsis, because that's exactly what the synopsis shows. the flags and the file list are interleaved, bestie. that's canon. 😭

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

picture this: a directory has twenty files in it, named storm001, storm002, ... all the way to storm020. each one of those files holds a single RIS8 image. very consistent of them, slay.

so you wanna compress all those images using run-length encoding and drop them into a file named altcomp.hdf. the move is:

hdfcomp allcomp.hdf -c storm*.hdf

that's it. that's the command. she ate and left no crumbs. 💅

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• hdfpack(1)
• hdf(5)

go read those too, iykyk. 👑

kisses, bestie — this page is from the HDFCOMP(1) manual, dated November 6, 1999, and it lives in the General Commands Manual. go compress something pretty. 💖✨🎀