Help understanding file structure of NWChem


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Gets Around
Hi Bill,

I don't think there is any explicit, independent documentation. I have learned something about some of these files by reading the source code and trying to reproduce interfaces to them. One of these days I mean to build a platform independent interface for .db files. A while ago I built a platform independent interface for .movecs files: https://github.com/mattbernst/nwflask/blob/master/chemnw/movecs.py

It's not really a document, but it's heavily commented, including notes about the historical evolution of the file structure. I wrote it because I had some old NWChem jobs lying around, some generated with version 4.0 on SGI machines. Unlike the mov2asc and asc2mov program, this translator can do exact binary conversions and will automatically handle 64/32 bit, big-endian/little-endian data encoding issues. It will even let you convert old (pre-4.1) .movecs files to the format used by modern NWChem -- basically just adding an additional value that later files expect.