Last Spring, when I was doing a lot of testing, trying to bring my archaeological research data into GRASS, I ran into a problem with s.in.dbf. Basically, it didn't work right. Sometimes it wouldn't import anything and other times it would import the site points (i.e., xy coordinates) and text fields, but remaining fields would go to 0.
Various people were helpful and the problems were finally reported as solved in the CVS. I couldn't test it at the time as I was unable to build grass for a variety of reasons.
A short time ago I was able to build version 5.3 successfully. I just tried s.in.dbf and it worked (that is didn't work) as before. It imported my test dbf file, put the points in the correct place, put all the field names correctly in the description line, then misread the actually number of numeric fields (6 instead of the proper 11) and set all values to 0.
Is this because 1) the old version rather than the fixed version somehow is included in the CVS snapshot of GRASS 5.3? or 2) because the fix (which I was never able to test before) didn't really fix the problem and no one knew that until now? Has anyone else had any problems with this? Is there a secret codeword I am missing 
I'd like to tell my class here at Valencia that it works (it came up this week which prompted me to try it again).
Saludos
Michael Barton
____________________
C. Michael Barton, Professor
Department of Anthropology
PO Box 872402
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2402
USA
Phone: 480-965-6262
Fax: 480-965-7671