Importing SCS Soil data as Grass3 vector files

Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1992 10:29 PST
From: FINNEYB@AXE.HUMBOLDT.EDU
Subject: Importing SCS Soil data as Grass3 vector files
To: grassp-list@amber.cecer.army.mil

I have been provided with a series of Grass3 format vector files
from the SCS digital soils database (Hawaii, Island of Oahu).
The files were generated on a AT&T 6386 Unix box. I am trying
to use them on a Sun SparcStation running Grass4. To convert
these files to grass4 vector format I have tried to use v.support
(which runs v.from.3). After the file is written out to a temp file,
the program begins to rebuild the file in the new format. After the
first 243 byes are written into the new file, I get the following error
message:
OUT OF MEMORY!
ALLOC_POINTS Returned error
Requested 33554433 Previous 0
Out of memoryError.......etc

Anyone have any ideas what has gone wrong? The version 3 vector file
is only 4474 bytes long, so a true out of memory error seems unlikely.
Does the byte ordering of the Intel machine the SCS files came from
have any bearing on this?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Brad Finney, Environmental Engineering, Humboldt State Univ, CA
finneyb@axe.humboldt.edu (phone 707-826-3918)

The problem is the byte ordering between the two machines. The GRASS 3.0
procedure for transporting vector files was to convert them to ASCII before
moving them. The best you can do now is to move the files back to
a machine with Intel type byte ordering and run v.support on them there.
This would include any PC based system, or a Sun 386i (remember those?),
or I think Intergraphs are backwards too.

Other options require quite a bit of code hacking to correct the problem.

--

  Dave Gerdes
  US Army Construction Engineering Research Lab
  Spatial Analysis & Systems Team
  dpgerdes@cerl.cecer.army.mil
  (217) 352-6511 x591