Other useful environment variables

Three non-SURF environment variables can be used to affect the behaviour of SURF.

HDS_SCRATCH

As described in (SUN/92), this variable defines the directory in which HDS will create temporary files. This variable must sometimes be set when you are accessing data from directories in which you do not have write permission.

Usually, this variable should be set to a local scratch disk:

% setenv HDS_SCRATCH /tmp

This has the additional advantage that NFS traffic can be reduced when accessing data on remote disks as the scratch files can be written locally.

ADAM_ABBRV

Another useful environment variable is ADAM_ABBRV. If this envrionment variable is set, parameter abbreviation is turned on (e.g., PIXSIZE_OUT can be referenced as PIX).

ADAM_EXIT

If this environment variable is set when an ADAM task terminates, the calling process will exit with system status set to 1 if the ADAM status was set, or 0 if the ADAM status was okay. This is useful when writing shell scripts.

All the ADAM environment variables are listed in SUN/144 [15].