It seems, the line of code next to RUN... does not wait until task is completed.
Try something like: wait wind time 3.0 "PLease wait..." or write a subprocedure to check whether size of the bigfile.DAT stop to increase.

Hope this help
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Your mesage below
I'm using the DOS shell RUN COPY *.* bigfile.DAT to concatenate a bunch of little files into one big one then append the bigfile.dat into a table. Problem is that VFP6 always thinks the bigfile.dat is in use by another and won't let me use it after I append files into it. Anyone got a hint as to how to avoid this?

thanks