Using Unix pipes, we can unpack Abacus ASDF files in Python and pipe the binary output over stdout so that client C/Fortran/etc programs can just read the raw binary over stdin. This directory contains a Python script called pipe_asdf.py that does the reading and pipes the data to stdout, and an example analysis program called client.c that reads the data over stdin.

The pipe_asdf.py script is normally installed as pipe_asdf via pip. However, one can also invoke the .py file directly from this directory.

For full documentation, see the abacusutils pipe_asdf documentation.

The client.c file is a stand-in for an "analysis" code that reads the raw binary data for two columns, N and x_com, and does something with the data (in this case, just prints some values).

One can build this program with:

$ make

and run it with:

$ ./pipe_asdf.py halo_info_000.asdf -f N -f x_com | ./client

You can use the example halo_info_000.asdf file symlinked from this directory to test this.