The dat2dbf program takes the name of a file from the command line, reads the file and copies it to a dBase file. The name of the output file can be set using the -o flag. If -o is not specified, the program changes the file name to end in .dbf and writes the output to that file.
The first data row in the file is treated as a list of variable names. Subsequent lines are treated as data. The number of columns must remain the same on all data lines.
dat2dbf -o ../data/monet.dbf monet.txt