I changed my mind and have a second question. To continue this discussion, since I'm dealing with a CURSOR, what do you do if you want to change the index to something else? I just tried and I get a message saying that "10943510.tmp is read only". The way I did this is as follows:

** SQL command that created the cursor:
blah blah blah into cursor PDETS
index on pe tag pe
*** THIS WORKED BEAUTIFULLY, just like I expected

** then I executed other code using the cursor,
select fileX
set relation to pe into PDETS
blah blah etc

** now I want to reindex on another field and do other stuff
sele PDETS
index on name tag name

this is when I get the error message. I can rerun the sql and then issue the index (thus blowing away the tmp file and recreating a new one), but that's not really what I want to do. At least when I specified the index name I never ran across this. Any advice appreciated.