Sandy,
You could use a memo for lines less that the stupidly small SET MEMOWIDTH limit
(I just looked in the help file VFP6 has raised it to 8K):
create cursor temp ( mText m )
append blank
append memo mText from TheASCIIFile
set textmerge to TheASCIIFILE
set textmerge on
for i = 1 to memlines( mText )
cLine = mline( i )
\\<
>
endfor
But 2k lines are going to cause lots of grief. I'd just switch to fgets() from one file, fputs() to another file, then erase the original and rename the converted output file.
>Good idea unforunately some of these Oracle files are more than 2000 characters in length.