The following enhancements have been made in the area of File Access in the IDL 6.0 release:
IDL 6.0 has been upgraded to use NetCDF version 3.5. This library upgrade does not include new functionality added to the NetCDF code library since version 2.4. However, it does take advantage of performance improvements, bug fixes, and other such enhancements.
The FILE_LINES function now allows you to obtain the number of lines of text within a GZIP compressed file or files, using the COMPRESS keyword. If this keyword is set, FILE_LINES assumes the input files are compressed in the standard GZIP format, and decompresses the data to count the number of lines. See FILE_LINES for details.
Given a file path, the new FILE_BASENAME function returns the base file name it references, and the new FILE_DIRNAME function returns the directory part (i.e. all of the path except for the base file name). These functions are similar to, and based on, the standard Unix basename(1) and dirname(1) utilities.
See FILE_BASENAME and FILE_DIRNAME for more details.