add nocolons option to namelist.wps.all_options

[andreas-h]

It would be nice if nocolons would be added to the namelist.wps.all_options file, in order to improve discoverability by the user.

If welcome, I'm happy to submit a PR.

[mgduda]

It may have been quite some time since the nocolons option was actually tested, but assuming it works, I think submitting a PR to include it in the namelist.wps.all_options file sounds good to me.

[davegill]

I seem to remember that the real program may not work with the nocolons option activated, where the metgrid file has underscores instead of colons.

[letmaik]

nocolons works in WRF but not WPS. In our fork for CMake we had to make changes to the following files: metgrid/src/{read,write}_met_module.F, ungrib/src/{datint,output,rrpr,ungrib}.F. In those files we simply replaced the colons with underscores in all cases without looking at a namelist option as it seemed to be a bit hard to get hold of it in certain cases.

[andreas-h]

I used the nocolons option this week without problems in both WPS and real.exe.

[letmaik]

@andreas-h I seriously doubt that WPS in your case did not include colons in filenames. See some of the places below which unconditionally use colons. Can you name some example filenames that you got? Maybe we talk about different things.

WPS/metgrid/src/write_met_module.F

Lines 33 to 39 in 99f3ef5

	! 1) BUILD FILENAME BASED ON TIME
	met_out_filename = ' '
	if (.not. source_is_constant) then
	write(met_out_filename, '(a)') trim(fg_source)//':'//trim(datestr)
	else
	write(met_out_filename, '(a)') trim(fg_source)
	end if

WPS/ungrib/src/output.F

Lines 133 to 157 in 99f3ef5

	if (iflag.eq.1) then
	if (nfiles.eq.0) then
	open(iunit, file=trim(get_path(prefix))//'PFILE:'//HDATE(1:datelen), form='unformatted', &
	position='REWIND')
	nfiles = nfiles + 1
	filedates(nfiles)(1:datelen) = hdate(1:datelen)
	else
	DOFILES : do k = 1, nfiles
	if (hdate(1:datelen).eq.filedates(k)(1:datelen)) then
	open(iunit, file=trim(get_path(prefix))//'PFILE:'//HDATE(1:datelen), form='unformatted',&
	position='APPEND')
	endif
	enddo DOFILES
	inquire (iunit, OPENED=LOPEN)
	if (.not. LOPEN) then
	open(iunit, file=trim(get_path(prefix))//'PFILE:'//HDATE(1:datelen), form='unformatted', &
	position='REWIND')
	nfiles = nfiles + 1
	filedates(nfiles)(1:datelen) = hdate(1:datelen)
	endif
	endif
	else if (iflag.eq.2) then
	open(iunit, file=trim(prefix)//':'//HDATE(1:datelen), form='unformatted', &
	position='REWIND')
	endif

WPS/ungrib/src/ungrib.F

Lines 389 to 391 in 99f3ef5

	! Now delete the temporary files:
	call file_delete(filedates, nfiles, trim(get_path(prefix))//'PFILE:', interval)

[andreas-h]

File names look like this: met_em.d05.2015-08-27_12_00_00.nc Ungrib output does indeed contain colons, but as that's never being read by wrf with pnetcdf I don't mind.

[douglowe]

Revisiting this request - I've found that the colons in the ungrib output is breaking my workflow when using singularity containers.

The following bind statement fails - singularity tries to bind a SFCFILE file instead:

--bind \
    /[local path]/SFCFILE:2020-01-04_12:/UWFwyQ/SFCFILE:2020-01-04_12:ro \

I do note that singularity v3.9 onwards might not be subject to this limitation (see sylabs/singularity#118) - but I'm stuck with singularity 3.5.2 on our local HPC system, which definitely can't cope with this issue.