Mark,
What Ed said is the perfect way of creating a read/write cursor and altering, dropping fields.
I noticed something else in yur post Mark. You want to make processes in memory instead of disk. It's not possible with cursors. Cursors, how small they are, are created on disk so you might be slowing things down. scan...endscan might prove to be more effective. Think of it for a moment.
Cetin

>Thank you very much Ed,,
>there it is..
>
>Mark
>
>>Any read-only cursor can be converted to read-write one programmatically and subsequently its structure can be changed:
>>Select MyField From MyTable Into Cursor tmpReadonly NOFILTER
>>cDbf=dbf()
>>Select 0
>>Use (cDbf) AGAIN ALIAS tmpReadWrite
>>Use In tmpReadonly
>>Alter Table tmpReadWrite Add Column MyNewField C(10)
>>
>>>Thanks guys for your replys,, for a moment I thought I saw a posting
>>>in wich you can actually do the Modi Struc for a View cursor,,
>>>but I think is different.
>>>What I wanted to do is,that usually I work with large tables for diff
>>>projects and certain fields (not all the fields) for example,
>>>name, address , city state zip dpb fields need to be formated in a specific
>>>format for BuscroEktajet machines for Bulk Mail processing and I tough
>>>if I created a cursor with the req fields and then add some temp ones
>>>then most of the formating routines will run wayyy faster in memory rather
>>>than I/O process in the original table.
>>>that's all, some of my tables are about 1.5M records and 500,00 recds
>>>
>>>thanks
>>>Mark
>>>
>>>>Hi Mark,
>>>>
>>>>>I think someone ask this before , but once you get your cursor
>>>>>after a " Select fields, into cursor Mycursorx', can I change
>>>>>that cursor (Mycursor) structure somehow, or it is Read-Only
>>>>>always...
>>>>
>>>>It is possible, but I wouldn't do it. With the SELECT statement you can create exactly the table you want. What kind of manipulation are you trying to do?
>>>>
>>>>Christof