bin5w Documentation

bin5w - Write an IDL array to a BIN5 format file

This is a routine that can be called from IDL and thus
can be used for writing IDL programs that perform specialized
processing of HDF/HDF-EOS data that have been extracted by the
"cv" program.  See also the "bin5r" and "bin5lab" routines.

pro bin5w,  name,head,aa,verb=verb,arc=arc
;_Titl  BIN5W  Write numeric binary files with 'standard' header
; name	in.	File name
; head	in.	String text to insert in header, any length
; aa	in.	Numeric array to write, any size; NOT structures or strings
; verb	in_	If set, will print file name after writing it
; arc	in_	String of desired file byte order.
;		 valid are 'sparc' 'alpha' 'x86', the last being PC Linux
;
;_USAGE example
; bin5w, file_name, descriptive_text, array_to_write

;_Desc          This routine matched with  BIN5R
;
; The header is ASCII and its length is always multiple of 512-bytes. 
; The first part contains the dimensions of the array as an IDL  SIZE vector,
; followed by the header size, then the date and time. This required 
; section ends with  >>.  After this comes the user-supplied text. 
; The header is blank-filled up to the last 10 bytes, which are always 
; the byte-architecture used to write the file followed by 'C_END'.
;
; There is a corresponding FORTRAN program  binf5.f 
;_Hist  97apr27 Hugh Kieffer   98mar15 revise header handling
; 98may08 HHK add record of byte architecture
; 99mar19 HHK compress size string and allow longer headers
; 99oct21 HHK add verbose option
; 99nov01 HHK add check for dangerous characters. Avoid undefined iod.
; 2000oct03 HHK Add check for input array type.
; 2001feb02 HHK  Added arc option
;_End