H5Dump

HDF5 is the most popular file format for storing binary data structures. The HDFView tool makes it convenient to view and browse the contents of a HDF5 file in a Java GUI. But what if you are at the commandline and need a way to quickly view or dump the contents of a HDF5 file? The h5dump does exactly this.

• It can be installed easily:

$ sudo apt install hdf5-tools

• To dump the contents of a file:

$ h5dump foobar.h5

• By default, you will notice that some data like string arrays are shown in a matrix format. To display all contents in one column format:

$ h5dump --width=1 foobar.h5
$ h5dump -w 1 foobar.h5

Tried with: HDF5 Tools 1.8.16 and Ubuntu 16.04