A week back, I reported that I couldn't import any ascii file with
string characters using s.in.ascii for GRASS 5.3 (it gave me a malloc
error).
A couple of days ago I updated s.in.ascii to catch some common input
errors; it probably still won't load your data, but hopefully will tell
you why and then exit cleanly.
I just had a report from a student using GRASS 5.3 under Cygwin
(Windows XP) that s.in.ascii doesn't work at all in this context. It
gives a 'segmentation fault. core dump' error.
If it still doesn't work with the new version, could you send me the
file you are trying to load[*] and the command line instructions you are
using?
[*] .zip or .tgz the file first so the version I get hasn't been
"cleansed" by the email systems in transit.
s.in.ascii is the only way you can get multi attribute data into GRASS
5.3 for points unless you use PostgreSQL.
Nope, it isn't pretty, but you can make them by hand fairly easily; see
the "internal sites format" sections in:
http://grass.ibiblio.org/gdp/html_grass5/html/s.in.ascii.html
http://grass.ibiblio.org/gdp/html_grass5/ascii_formats.html
Or in the sites chapter of the 5.0 Programmer's Manual.
A quick way is to use a specially crafted 'awk' or 'sed' command to
convert a whitespace delimited text file. Place the file in the
$MAPSET/site_lists/ directory and it should work.
Also there is s.in.dbf, but it needs some updating, which it probably
won't get anytime soon as newer (5.7+) versions of GRASS abandon the
old sites format.
Of course s.in.ascii should really be made to work correctly in the
first place..
Hamish