About the MFILE format

MFILE is a proprietary PCI file format you can use to open a collection of data sets from one ASCII file. That is, instead of having to open each individual file of a collection, you can list the file names of the collection in an MFILE, and then simply open the MFILE to view all of the data it contains.

An MFILE can have either an .mfile or a .txt file name extension; however, for the file to be a valid MFILE it must consist of one or more GDB-supported file names (with path) per line. If necessary, you can add a comment by entering an exclamation mark (!) at the beginning of a line. For example, a file oman.mfile is a valid MFILE when defined as follows:

	! MFILE for all four images
	P:\Oman\Oxy\Orthos_mask\po_1006981_0000000_ORTHO_PSH.pix
	P:\Oman\Oxy\Orthos_mask\po_1012738_0000000_ORTHO_PSH.pix
	P:\Oman\Oxy\Orthos_mask\po_986061_0000000_ORTHO_PSH.pix
	P:\Oman\Oxy\Orthos_mask\po_1015787_0000000_ORTHO_PSH.pix

In any CATALYST Professional program, such as Focus, in which you can open multiple files in File Selector, you can open an MFILE by selecting PCI Multi-File List (*.mfile/*.txt) from the Files of type list, and then selecting the MFILE you want to open.

An MFILE text file can also contain additional information. It can, for example, include, for each line, a different input channel and one or more NoData values. When opening an MFILE in the File Selector window, only the first component of each line is read; each subsequent component is ignored.

You can also use an MFILE text file in various CATALYST Professional algorithms that have an MFILE parameter, and also use it in some CATALYST Enterprise modules.