[netcdfgroup] Structure at the file level?

Greetings! I am making an information collector that will collect information from a bunch of processes on a bunch of machines. Initially, each process will write to it's own file on it's machine. Eventually, each process will contribute to a collector process on one machine using UDP. I'd like to use netCDF because of its self-describing nature, and because the information is uniform across machine architectures. But I wonder if netCDF can interpret a record in isolation, or if it depends on an overall file structure. I will end up with one big file containing records from a bunch of different sources. If a netCDF file is just a few records of common header information at the top, followed by a bunch of records, each of which is in an allowed format, but which are not in any particular order, I don't anticipate any problems. Has anybody collected records from a bunch of sources and put them all together in one file? 

            Regards,

            Rick

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Rick Hedin
Tradelink LLC
Tel:312.264.2110
Email:rickh@xxxxxxxxxx