[GRASS-user] Unable to import some raster and vector type maps

[Paul Kelly]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Eric & Elga wrote:

> Very new user of GRASS, I was finally able to run the native Wingrass63RC5 under Win2k after renaming the "wish85.exe" and "tclsh85.exe" into "wish.exe" and "tclsh.exe" (is that correct ?).

As you've seen that works, or you can also set the environment variable 
GRASS_WISH to wish85.exe and that should also work. If you don't like 
setting environment variables in Windows you can edit the line containing 
GRASS_WISH in grass63.bat (the startup script) to achieve the same result.

> After having created a new project location, I try to import SRTM3 and SWBD files but when I call the modules "r.in.srtm" or "v.in.e00" through the menu, they crash telling me that the « child process exited abnormally ». This happens also with the "Terra ASTER" and "SPOT NDVI" ones for example, while others, like "Binary", seem to work fine.

r.in.srtm and v.in.e00 are shell scripts and will not run on a normal 
Windows installation. You need to install a Bash shell environment if you 
want to use them - most people use MinGW and Msys for this. Then you need 
to make sure the GRASS_SH environment variable is set to the location of 
your sh.exe or bash.exe shell, and also make sure that the MinGW and MSys 
bin directories are in your PATH. Again, there are example lines you can 
edit in grass63.bat if you want to set this up without editing Windows 
environment variables directly.

> If I use QGIS to call the module "r.in.srtm" it doesn't crash, but when I specify a compressed (or even uncompressed) SRTM file (without the ".hgt.zip" extension), it tells me « "unzip" and "file" are required, please install them first ». For "v.in.e00" it tells me « 'avcimport' program not found, install it first ».

All this is telling you that QGIS has partly set up the required Unix 
shell environment for you to run those scripts (r.in.srtm/v.in.e00) but 
not all the Unix commands you need are available on your system. Check 
first that unzip.exe and file.exe really aren't there in your Msys or 
Mingw directories - they might be there but just not in the PATH. If not 
you may be able to get them from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/, 
although I'm not sure exactly which package they'd be in. I'm not sure 
where you'd get avcimport from.

Hope this makes things clearer; I'm not sure if it will get you anywhere 
though.

Paul