>>

>>CREATE CURSOR test (long_field_name c(1))
>>
>>ALTER table DBF("test") add shortf c(1)
>>

>
>The second line won't be of any help here, as I found out earlier today.
>
>Perhaps you implied to say that ALTER TABLE does not deal with cursors. However, it does alter a cursor also. The next command will work:
>
>

CREATE CURSOR test (shortf c(1))
>
>ALTER table test alter column shortf c(2)

Actually, the second line in my example will work fine IF the cursor has a disk presence. The problem is that VFP won't write the cursor to disk until it has to, otherwise it will keep it in RAM and there is no DBF file.