thanks Al
I'm not getting any of the selected records in the browse - but the good news is no errors once i use set enginebehavior 70.

Here's the old school of exactly what i want to do and it gives me the info i require. I was looking for more sophisticated way to catpure the search.

extra=" "
do while not eof()
if ex1s>0
extra=rtrim(extra)+vname+"."
endif
skip 
loop
enddo

? extra

>>Hilmar sent me this solution for tracking duplicates in a database a little while ago - it works very well.
>>Further to this solution, how would i display the names plus an added field called field2 and attribute this information to a variable called myinfo.
>>
>>Thanks for your help.
>>k
>
>Guessing about exactly what you want to do:
>

>select name, count(*) as count, field2 AS MyInfo ;
> from mydata;
>group by name;
>having count > 1;
>INTO CURSOR TEMPDUPLICATE
>if _tally > 0
>MessageBox("Alert: There are duplicates.")
>browse normal
>endif
>>

>I believe VFP9 (maybe 8 as well) won't let you GROUP BY unless you include all non-aggregate columns. In that case you may need to temporarily SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 70 to make the command work.