Colin,

I use a kind of similar scheme. In a certain table each user creates a record and it is locked with rlock(). However, the session might crash. In that case the record will be unlocked, which is useful info by the way. But there's another situation that needs to be tackled. It is the situation that some other process uses the exe (indeed a vfp-exe in my case) or that the exe is used with a dataset that I have not under control, e.g. a local dataset. In that case I try to FOPEN() the exe as readwrite. This takes one second on my development machine, but it appears to take far more time on another network. I'm wondering whether there is a faster way to check its usage.

I have also tried the API call OpenFile(). This one too is one second on my machine, indicating it is the lowlevel equivalent of FOPEN().

>Peter
>
>I usually try to open one of the apps shared tables as exclusive - if I get an error the app is in use
>
>I take this a stage further - all users have temp files on their cdrives which they open as exclusive - I poll round the pcs in the network attempting to open one of their temp files as exclusive - error = user in app
>
>Then a form diplays the results with a colour box next to each user name - green = not using app, red = using app, blue = pc not on line
>
>Our ops pepole use this screen at night to make sure all are out of apps so that overnight runs can work
>
>HTH
>
>Colin
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>What is the fastest way to check whether an EXE is in use?