>With the language I use to work with (BBX), you could open a file handle to an external program and return the standard output of that command with each read. An example would be:
>
>10 Open(1)"|DIR"
>20 Read(1)a$
>30 Print a$
>40 Goto 20
>
>By using the Pipe symbol as the first character of the file to be opened, it created a link to the file handle. Each Read of that channel would return one line of standard output from the DIR commnad.
>

Looks a whole lot like old MBASIC (or any other pre-visual BASIC)...

No - VFP does not use STDIN/STDOUT in that fashion; it's not a console app. You can open a file by name and read/write it a line at a time using low-level file I/O (FGETS() reads a file a line at a time to the line terminator, EOF or maximum line lngth specified, FPUTS() writes a line at a time with a line terminator.) You can do the STDIN/STDOUT stuff easily enough using VBScript or JScript and if VFP really is needed in all of this, the script language can instance a VFP COM object and pass stuff line at a time or whatever to VFP via COM. The script stuff should be tiny and unless you need all the database processing of VFP directly, you need not even use a VFP COM object if all that's neeed is to write stuff into a table.