>>Maximum # of characters per character string or memory variable--16,777,184
>
>James,
>(not intending any squabble - .2 cents addition:)
>In a previous reply I saw fread() to count lines.
>Real problem with fread() it should be done byte by byte. The code I saw would error on first call to fread. fgets() could be used but it has a bug (cannot handle lines > 8192chars - maybe fixed in SP4?) OTOH for huge files (>1 billion lines < bg >) lowlevel sounds to be the only way (for >2Gb files I don't have an idea what OS response would be).
>IMHO Barbara's original reply is the best with a slight modification (so it's faster than array approach too):
>
>

create cursor dummy (f1 l) && Smallest possible to speed up
>append from (lcFile) type sdf
>nLines = reccount()
>use in 'dummy'

>Best regards
>Cetin

Yes, in this example should be fgets(). I had 5 mln records text comma-delimited file. I appended to the dbf file with the exact structure. It took about 20-30 minutes to append. No indexes were in this DBF.

I'll try both solutions on this file, to see, that's the fastest approach.

Thanks for ideas.