>Thanks Borislav. That's what I ended up doing; copied the disk file to a temp file, then read the temp. However, there's no clear way to determine if the original disk file is there, since all VFP native functions refer to the file within the exe. Therefore, COPY or RENAME have to be used within TRY ... ENTRY, or any other exception/error handling structure.

You need a naming convention, then. Prefix the filenames of such files that you want copied out, i.e. the disk version should be named differently from the in-exe original, and prefixing (or having a different extension, perhaps) is a simple way to do that.

Just tried now:

?juststem("a.b.c")

returns a.b - so, you can add an extra extension to the in-exe file, and just strip that extension when you want it on disk.

p.s. "naming convention" is when we all gather in a hotel, drink and invent names.