[MITgcm-support] Sea Ice experiment s12t_16x32

[Lucas Merckelbach]

Hi Amitabh Mitra,

> I would like to thank Mr. Ed Hill
> for this command 
> export SKIP_NETCDF_CHECK=t
> which helped me create the Makefile in gcc environment
[...]
> ... What does this command do and when is it used ?

Basically "export SKIP_NETCDF_CHECK=t" is short for
"SKIP_NETCDF_CHECK=t" followed by
"export SKIP_NETCDF_CHECK"

The first step assigns, as you may guess the value "t" to a variable 
called SKIP_NETCDF_CHECK. This variable is used in the genmake2 script to 
find out if it should try to compile a test program using netcdf. Probably 
this was the point where your genmake2 to invocation failed. By setting 
this variable to "t" the check is bypassed. However, if you set 
SKIP_NETCDF_CHECK to "t" from the command line and then run genmake2, the 
variable is not known inside the genmake2 script. Therefore, in bash that 
is, you export the variable name, which means that all the shell scripts 
spawn from the current shell will have this variable set. So setting the 
variable, and then running the genmake2 script and the genmake2 script 
will know the value of SKIP_NETCDF_CHECK.

Hope this helps,

Cheers,
Lucas