Would the FILE() function help? If so, you might search on "FILE" because there have some good discussions on subtle considerations.

>I don't recall of a function in VFP to check for the validity of filenames.
>But maybe I overlooked it.
>Anybody now how to check the validity of a given filename.
>This comes in handy especially when users are specifying the name for export files.
>For example when they had a filename containing a "*".
>Maybe a Win32 API call ?