For PnetCDF, checking whether a variable is a record variable can just check the
first dimension, because CDF-1,2,5 formats allow only the first dimension to be
unlimited.

The above code block can be simplified to the following.

int *p = (dimidsp) ? dimidsp : tmp_dimidsp;
file->varlist[varid].rec_var = (ndims > 0 && p[0] == NC_UNLIMITED) ? 1 : 0;