While on the subject, perhaps someone could explain this: I thought if you cat a file it merely displays the contents on screen. What I don't
understand is that if I cat my translation file to /proc/empeg_ir then when I cat /proc/empeg_ir I would expect it to only display the contents of this
file which should be a replica of the original file as I am replacing the file and not appending to it. However, a cat /proc/empeg_ir reveals extra
header information. Where does this come from?

Somebody else will probably be able to provide details, but raughly speaking /proc filesystem is magical: files there are not 'real', but serve as
interface to various drivers, 'window' into various kernel tables etc. So, each file has its own particular behaviour and meaning, both when written to
and read from.

That's right.With a default kernel, the /proc/empeg_ir entry is displaying the "header" information. I just added the translation-table at the end and wrote a function that reads from /proc/empeg_ir for input.
To set a custom translation-table, you should add a line in your init script which cats a file containing the translation-table to /proc/empeg_ir :

cat /tmp/ir_transtable > /proc/empeg_ir

Frank van Gestel