>>>This is weird. I am using PUTFILE() as below, tname is about 30 characters but somehow I am only getting the last 6 characters as the name to save as. so instead of getting "data in tName column" I am getting "column".
>>>Now, I am using the same code somewhere else and it is working as expected.
>>>
>>>Any idea??
>>>
>>>cFileName = PUTFILE('CSR:',ALLTRIM(table1.tname)+".csr",'csr')
...
>I tried with extension, without extension. created variable to hold the name, used LEFT() with LEN(). I mean anything I can think of and still not working on this one. then work perfect on another screen...

Try with m.cFileName - you may be sitting on an alias where you have a cFileName field which is c(6). Or just rename the variable to lcFileName.