I'm not quite sure what you want to do here.

If you're just asking how to append points to a wave, you can use either the Redimension or InsertPoints operations to add additional points onto a wave. You could then re-save the entire wave to your data file, overwriting the file in the process.

If overwriting the data file every hour is too time consuming or otherwise not a good solution, you could create a new wave each hour in your acquisition program, and append each successive wave to your data file every hour. To avoid the need to overwrite your data file every time you save to it, you'll want to either save each new wave in an unpacked experiment or save your data file as a type that can be appended to. Igor text files can be appended. For my data acquisition, I use the HDF5 XOP included with Igor to add new waves to a HDF5 file that I save my data into.

When you then open your data file, if you want all points to be in one single wave, it's easy to combine all of your waves into a single wave for analysis. You can do this in a loop, or the Concatenate operation will possibly be of use to you.

Ok, so that's basically what I said initially.

So, as an example, you can try something like this:

Make/O/N=(3600, 3) myDataWave
<acquire some data and fill out the wave>
<save that wave to a data file>
Make/O/N(3600,3) myDataWave     // This line isn't really necessary
<acquire some more data into myDataWave>
 
// After another hour has passed, the following code gets executed
<open your data file>
<read in the data in your data file into a wave called savedData>
Variable savedRows = DimSize(savedData, 0)
Redimension/N=(savedRows + 3600, -1) savedData
savedData[savedRows - 1, savedRows - 1 + 3600] = myDataWave[p - savedRows]
<save the wave savedRows to your data file again>

Does this help?

Here is a brief example for a "one-column" wave. I prefer a multi-step approach, with "subroutines" that can be separately tested before moving to the next stage.

Create a function to load a file into a wave ...

Function LoadMyFile()
   // load the file into wave MyWave
   ...
end

Create a function to add waves together into CatWave ...

Function CatMyWave()
    ...
    npntsMyWave = numpnts(MyWave)
    npntsCatWave = numpnts(CatWave)
    npntsTotal = npntsMyWave + npntsCatWave
    redimension/N=(npntsTotal) CatWave
    CatWave[npntsCatWave,npntsTotal-1] = MyWave[p-npntsCatWave]
    return 0
end

Run these two in a loop function ...

Function GetMyData(howmany)
   variable howmany
   ...
   for(ic=0;ic<howmany;ic+=1)
     LoadMyFile()
     CatMyWave()
   endfor
   return 0
end

HTH

--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAH

That concantenate procedure worked well, it just sucks to have to go through and rename 40 columns when I load the second file

Thanks for the help!!!

I took that code and modified it into this to work for me how I needed it

Function CCNLoader()
	do
		LoadWave/J/D/A=wave/K=0/L={4,6,0,0,0}
		if (V_flag == 0)		// Break if user hit the cancel button.
			break
		endif
		Concatenate/NP {wave0}, TimeAll
		Concatenate/NP {wave1}, CurrentSSAll
		Concatenate/NP {wave45}, CCNNumberAll
		KillWaves wave0,wave1,wave2,wave3,wave4,wave5,wave6,wave7,wave8,wave9,wave10,wave11,wave12,wave13,wave14,wave15,wave16,wave17,wave18,wave19,wave20,wave21,wave22,wave23,wave24,wave25,wave26,wave27,wave28,wave29,wave30,wave31,wave32,wave33,wave34,wave35,wave36,wave37,wave38,wave39,wave40,wave41,wave42,wave43,wave44,wave45,wave46,wave47
	while(1)
 
End