Have you ever had difficulty figuring out why the file you just pulled up is not the one you expected?  Maybe a back-up version or something?

Use the Trail File to discover where that file came from.

Pro/Engineer creates a Trail File (trail.txt.#) with each session.  Depending on your set-up, that file may be in the start-up directory or in a trail file directory specified in your config.pro.  These trail files contain information about the session and what was happening.

Trail files are most often just discarded, but they can also be used to diagnose problems.  An example is to see where a part or assembly file was loaded from.

The Figure below shows a part of a trail file where an assembly was loaded.  It shows the location of each part and assembly file loaded.  In this example, most of the files were loaded from the directory where the assembly was, however, one was loaded from a \bak\ directory, and one from a standard parts directory.

You can open a trail file using any text editor (something like WordPad in Windows).  You can even open it while Pro/E is in session if you need to see where something you just loaded came from.

How Pro/E found these files is another discussion -- including search paths -- discussed in our October 2003 Tip-of-the-Month.

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