20010814: LWPATH.NAM

>From: Owen Cooper <address@hidden>
>Organization: NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory
>Keywords: 200108142322.f7ENM1118362 McIDAS REDIRECT LWPATH.NAM

Owen,

>I am creating some new .NAM files in my /home/ocooper/mcidas/data account.
>To use the new NAM files I type REDIRECT REST NAMFILE.NAM
>I do a REDIRECT LIST and everything is fine.

OK.

>But if I restore the /home/ocooper/mcidas/data/LWPATH.NAM file it gets
>overwritten and the file is empty.

LWPATH.NAM is the name of the file that is created/updated when one runs
any REDIRECT command.  If you want to keep a few .NAM files to specify
different REDIRECTion sets, you only need to make sure that you do not
specify any of the names as LWPATH.NAM.

>It appears to have something to do with the following entry in the
>LWPATH.NAM file:
>
>LWPATH.NAM   .
>
>which is specifying the /home/ocooper/mcidas/data directory right?

Right.  The reason I set this up in the EXAMPLE.NAM template was so that
_if_ for some reason a copy of LWPATH.NAM got written into a directory
in one's MCPATH other than his/her McIDAS working directory, the copy
in the working directory would be used in preferance to that other copy.
Remember, REDIRECTions take precedence over MCPATH entries.

>Do I need this entry? And do you know how I keep from having this file
>overwritten?

If nobody ever writes a file named LWPATH.NAM in any directory in your
MCPATH, then no.  This was added as a safeguard.

>Okay, I just commented-out the LWPATH.NAM    .
>entry and the file still got overwritten.
>
>Any ideas?

LWPATH.NAM got overwritten since it _always_ gets overwritten by design.
If you want to keep a set of default REDIRECTions that you can go back to
after using a different set (like from NAMFILE.NAM) use a different name
like LWPATH.BAK.

Tom