thank you all for your replies and suggestions. The situation is such that the operator does not actually APPEND but rather i have set up a procedure to read from an inserted text to secondary database which processes info then relays the pocessed data back to the main database. sometimes what happens is, that by operator error, the text is appended to the main database - this i the 'APPEND' i wanted to prevent - by inserting code at the source (select 1 etc NOAPPEND) to stop this from happening.

That said, my previous thread solved the problem in another way - that way was to test the database name
IF JUSTSTEM(DBF()) == "TIMETEMP" which Chuck had suggested -- and which works fine in making sure the right database was in place for the append and thus preventing the append to the main database.

At this point i was exploring the possibility of a redundant safety. So far so good ... but you can never have too many checks in place.


k