HDF5 command line tools
HDF5 command line tools h5dump and h5ls are handy to quickly explore HDF5 files from the command line. Backup link to old documentation. They are particularly useful when accessing a remote computer such as HPC where the HDF5 files may be very large and would take a while to transfer to a local computer.
h5ls provides a high-level look at objects in an HDF5 file. Typically we start examining HDF5 files by printing the dataset hierarchy:
h5ls --recursive my.h5Determine the filters used (e.g. was the data compressed):
h5ls --verbose my.h5h5dump can print the entire contents of an HDF5 file to the screen. This can be overwhelming, so we typically print only the headers to start:
h5dump --header my.h5Individual variables can be printed like:
h5dump --dataset=myvar my.h5Determine the filters used (e.g. was the data compressed):
h5dump --properties --header --dataset=myvar my.h5Related: HDF5 data GUI