Hey, I have to port over a program from the IRIX operating system on a SGI machine to a RedHat linux/Intel machine. There is a certain library (libSample.a) that I need to open and look at the contents but I am not entirely sure that I can do that. I open it with VIM and there is a bunch of mess along with the code. Are library files meant to be opened by an editor and looked at/changed? Or is there a certain program that will allow me to do this? Any ideas would be great. Thanks in advance.

No. It is a library archive of compiled objects, not text. However, if you want to see what objects are in it, you can use the 'ar' command. The '-t' option will print the archive's table of contents.

you will need the source code to that lib so you can recompile it on linux.