>Ok Guys! Sorry I was off the thread for a few days, but I wanted to answer Doris' question, "Why am I reprogramming Fox?" Well Doris you must be aware of some SET command or APPEND FROM argument which has of yet eluded me. Do me a favor and try this little test out. 1) Create a text file by opening a text editor and just typing into it WITHOUT inserting hard returns (No CRLF characters). Make sure to type a couple hundred characters in there for good measure. 2) Create a small .dbf table with 3 or four fields of 2 or three characters each. 3) Now use our highly esteem APPEND FROM command, APPEND FROM test.txt SDF.
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>Doris and/or Dave, what happend on your machine? Do you know of some undocumented aurgument that tells Fox to break the strings according to the character length of the .dbf table. Not that this would change my reasons for using low-level file functions, I do things like input audits and conditionally post incoming tape data and un-packing 'packed binary' data from its original EBCDIC format. APPEND FROM is limited. Yes your right Doris, Low-level file functions can be a big performance hit. Sometimes I use a langauge a little closer to the hardware. But in many cases Fox's LL File functions allow me to read in, interpret and audit incoming data as it would normally come to me form an Standard 9 Track Tape.
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>Dave, I never said you were a lazy programmer.
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>JP

You didn't say it, HE did! But I see your problem now, APPEND FROM will not handle Binary data or EBCDIC data format. You didn't mention that you were dealing with that type of data.

As for your little test, I really didn't need to run it since we get files that vary from 800K to 80Meg from the Comptroller's office every day (size depends on number of transactions for a given day) that only has a LF (a 'soft' return) at the end of the record line. Fox has no problems handling this while the UNISYS-COBOL mainframe herfs all over itself. In fact, it is becoming apparent that the best way for us to fix the problem is to run it through Fox BEFORE we upline to the MF.