Describe the Problem

Tina Kalb ran into unexpected behavior when running pcp_combine in the following way:

pcp_combine -add bad.grib bad.nc -field 'name="Z"; level="P500";'

DEBUG 2: Since the "-field" command line option was used, parsing the command line arguments as a list of files.
DEBUG 2: Performing derivation command (sum) for 17032 files.
DEBUG 1: Reading data (name="Z"; level="P500";) from input file: GRIB
ERROR  : 
ERROR  : grd_file_type() -> file does not exist "GRIB"
ERROR  : 

bad.grib.txt

The input "bad.grib" file is processed by the parse_ascii_file_list() function and one of the first 10 words is "/" which is counted as a valid path. So it's entire contents is treated as a file list and pcp_combine attempts to process the first word ("GRIB") as the path to a file.

Expected Behavior

We should have better logic to distinguish between file lists and data files. An input GRIB file should not be processed as being a file list.

Environment

Describe your runtime environment:

1. Repeatable on multiple environments. Originally found on eyewall but replicated on Mac.

To Reproduce

Describe the steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Save the attached "bad.grib.txt" file as "bad.grib".
2. Use met-9.1/bin/pcp_combine to run:

pcp_combine -add bad.grib bad.nc -field 'name="Z"; level="P500";'

3. Observe runtime error:

ERROR  : grd_file_type() -> file does not exist "GRIB"

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Assignee

• Select engineer(s) or no engineer required: John Halley Gotway
• Select scientist(s) or no scientist required: None required but Tina Kalb can review the PR.

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• METplus, MET, METdatadb, METviewer, METexpress, METcalcpy, METplotpy
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