HDF5 command line tool h5dump and h5ls are handy to quickly explore HDF5 files from the command line. They are particularly useful when accessing a remote computer such as HPC where the HDF5 files may be very large and would take a while to transfer to a local computer.

h5ls provides a high-level look at objects in an HDF5 file. Typically we start examining HDF5 files like:

h5ls -r my.h5

h5dump can print the entire contents of an HDF5 file to the screen. This can be overwhelming, so we typically print only the headers to start:

h5dump -H my.h5

Individual variables can be printed like:

h5dump -d myvar my.h5

Related: HDF5 data GUI