# What is .OVL file?



## newkidtopc (Jul 24, 2002)

Good morning,
What is an .OVL file?What is it used for?With what can I view the contents of the file?
Please help
Thnx in advance


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## AbvAvgUser (Oct 3, 2002)

Clipper 5.1 under DOS used to generate .ovl files i.e. overlay files for memory management (I suppose) because in those old days RAM used to be quite limited.

Don't know where you came across it.


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## TimCottee (Oct 10, 2001)

Indeed all versions of Clipper from Autumn '86 onwards use .ovl files. Essentially an executable file and one or more overlay files are created when you compile an application in clipper. Each overlay file contains one or more object libraries that are effectively loaded into memory on demand. This was an effective way of managing to fit large applications within the confines of the DOS restrictions. Unless you have the original source code it is likely to be difficult to get anything useful out of this file.


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## newkidtopc (Jul 24, 2002)

Thanks everybody for your replies,
The problem is that in the code that we are currently studying,a child process is being created using spawnlp() function in C language and this process uses the file with .OVL extension.What I am interested is that is this file created by programmer or by system?
How can I view the contents of this file?
Thanks


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