>PMFJI: At our location, the FoxPro system is an alternate storehouse for lots of data from mainframe and minicomputer systems, and virtually all incoming files are in ASCII text format, fixed length (SDF). We process hundreds of thousands of records of data that way every night, with no problems (other than network infrastructure...). I agree with Bruce that your most likely problem is just the 'fields' clause usage. Forget it. All our stuff just has an empty DBF structure and we run 'APPEND FROM xxxx TYPE SDF' from each of the files. At least a few of them are in excess of 2048 bytes per record. The 255 limit is for an individual field width, I think, and you can even get around that by making two fields and concatenating them for data manipulation...
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>Gonzo's technique is also a good one, but we like to work just on the DBFs (cause we're wimps on that low-level stuff...).

Also, I might guess that a lot of Replaces/Substrs like that would take longer on a large file...