>Ins't *e4*.jpg mean all files with .jpg extension?

So it would be, but M$ seems to have fixed that somewhere between DOS 2.0 and XP. It does return what you'd expect today (XP SP1). Works with aDir() too - except in situations like what Bruce described. I don't get 8.3 names, so I didn't have that problem.

I tried the adir(a, "*.jpg") with appending into cursor and then selecting where fname like "%71%" and it did return exactly the same number of files as dir *71*.jpg did - which is amazing. I didn't expect that to be fixed EVER :). Probably came with NTFS, but nobody bothered to advertise this scientific breakthrough.

I figure when Nad.. Naomi comes back to the digital world on Monday, she only needs to disable short names on that disk and use any of the dozen solutions we posted here :).