Previous: Compatability, Up: Compatability


1.2.1 Compiling NCO for Microsoft Windows OS

NCO has been successfully ported and tested on the Microsoft Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP) operating systems. The switches necessary to accomplish this are included in the standard distribution of NCO. Using the freely available Cygwin (formerly gnu-win32) development environment 1, the compilation process is very similar to installing NCO on a UNIX system. Set the PVM_ARCH preprocessor token to WIN32. Note that defining WIN32 has the side effect of disabling Internet features of NCO (see below). NCO should now build like it does on UNIX.

The least portable section of the code is the use of standard UNIX and Internet protocols (e.g., ftp, rcp, scp, sftp, getuid, gethostname, and header files <arpa/nameser.h> and <resolv.h>). Fortunately, these UNIX-y calls are only invoked by the single NCO subroutine which is responsible for retrieving files stored on remote systems (see Remote storage). In order to support NCO on the Microsoft Windows platforms, this single feature was disabled (on Windows OS only). This was required by Cygwin 18.x—newer versions of Cygwin may support these protocols (let me know if this is the case). The NCO operators should behave identically on Windows and UNIX platforms in all other respects.


Footnotes

[1] The Cygwin package is available from
http://sourceware.redhat.com/cygwin
Currently, Cygwin 20.x comes with the GNU C/C++/Fortran compilers (gcc, g++, g77). These GNU compilers may be used to build the netCDF distribution itself.