>Thanks all. I had read the help file for DELETE, but it seemed to only applly to Foxpro files
>I tried the ERASE lfilename, no go, but ERASE &lfilename worked musch faster.
>The files are firat scanned in with ADIR(), a buch of stuff checekd, added to a database then deleted from the floppy, then loop onto the next one

ERASE expects a name - you can use name expansion (enclose the variable in parentheses () to use name expansion) or use macro expansion, but macro expansion fails with file names that contain a space. It's also slower than name expansion, by a lot. Shelling to DOS to execute the deletion is even slower than macro expansion.