perhaps because cdr is not the only way he can get the information which he seeks. it is entirely possible he is looking for information that is also available in reports (thus removing the need to parse a CDR file, as reports in Vicidial already have interfaces).
and did i mention that as far as I know it IS part of the "deal' that to get free assistance you mention this information to help others who may ultimately have the same question.
in this case, different versions of vicidial have different reporting capacity. different installations (.iso's and scratch and different OS's) have different default setups for call logging (is logging even turned on in the version he installed?)
what if his instructions contained a line to turn off the asterisk cdr in favor of the mysql asteriskcdrdb?
all these things could come up, and if he were to get used to listing his configuration when asking any support question he COULD find that his answers are more forthcoming
if he installed with the latest trunk SVN with vicibox redux, for instance, you may tell him he's in the wrong forum
and someone else who installed it yesterday with the same version could have happened upon the CDR even thought they know nothing else about this software and actually post an answer directly on point ... not likely to happen without a version, cuz newbies don't generally jump in unless they are sure their answer is correct.
and if it has "no relation to vicidial", what is it doing in the vicidial forum? it's here because he IS asking about a vicidial server, and often that leads to deeper "do it in vicidial instead of wherever" reasoning.
k?