>Thanks for the advise!!
>
>However, now my clients want me to create a button that could ftp to a UNIX plateform server and merge those text files into my databases.
>I know that fopen() function could only open the files in the local machine and return a logical expression. But I want to able to open up a socket like most of the ftp command. Is there any command that will allow me to do so??
>
>Any ideas!!

I saw something here where someone subclassed IE to put on a form that started the IE browser. I do not see why you could not subclass something like FTP-Pro and place it on a form to start up a pre-defined FTP session. I still think there would have to be some "user-intervention" to select the files to retrieve/download. I am not sure if FTP-Pro could be setup to do an automated download from a predetermined site into your TextFile sub-directory. Once completed, end the ftp session, return control to VFP where the completion of the "appending" of the text files just downloaded could take place. Whew!

Sounds like an experimental process to me. Good luck.