>I thought I had read somewhere that you could design your project so that when compiled it would accept parameters from the command line (the names of the files upone which the program is to operate for instance). I have not been able to find it in the help facility. Is there a way to do this?

Yes. The MAIN program for your .EXE should have appropriate LPARAMETER or PARAMETERS statements; if any arguments are passed on the command line, they'll be pulled in as character strings If your main program starts with the line:

LPARAMETERS uVar1, uVar2, uVar3

then up to three command line parameters could be accepted by the program - if there are fewer command line parameters specified, the 'excess' parameters will be set to logical .F.

If you need to pass a command line parameter that includes embedded delimiters like spaces, enclose it in double quotes (") on the commmand line. if your app has the LPARAMETERS statement above, and you start the app with the command:

MyApp Today Is Wednesday

UVar1 will be set to "Today", uVar2 to "Is" and uVar3 to "Wednesday", while if you start it with

MyApp "Today Is Wednesday"

uVar1 will be set to "Today Is Wednesday", and uVar2 and uVar3 will be logical .F.

You can only pass character strings on the command line. To pass a number or date, you'll have to invoke VFP functions like VAL() and CTOD() to convert them for you.