>I want to build a VFP program that will determine, and allow setting about 30 variables that will be used to add, delete, or modify lines in what is effectively an INI file. The problem is that this file can range up to about 50 or 60 MegaBytes in size. I read in the VFP help file on System Capacities that the Maximum # of characters per character string or memory variable is 16,777,184 … about 1/3 the size of my file.
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>I plan to read the file size, and use a straight forward approach (reading it into memory and manipulating it there) if it's small enough, but now I need an approach that will work with files I find that are larger than about 16 MB.

Wow, this seems to be a change from VFP5. I just looked at the VFP5 help and it says 2GB. But you're right, the VFP6 help says 16MB. I wonder why they did that?!?! I just tried loading a 20MB file with FILETOSTR and it loaded OK. It did take a long time though, probably accessing the swap file. But it does seem like it will handle longer that 16MB...