>Dear Alex,
> Thanks for your advice. It's a good idea to blank all deleted records. Actually my program is a restaurant ordering/payment system. My strategy is to use a temporary file temp.dbf to hold details of an order. After the payment I zap the file and use it for next order. It involves many zap commands. If I use your method I still have to rewrite many parts of the program. It is another alternative to my way. Is there any quicker way?
>
>Regards,
>Harry

Do you keep temp.dbf in the local workstation (assuming your program is multi-user)?
In this case I don't see a problem with ZAP as each workstation will use its local copy so it is in effect a single-user file.

In a multi-user situation you can just create a temporary cursor (in memory) from scratch with a CREATE CURSOR... command to get the desider structure. If you must have a table then you can use a random filename and delete afterwards (you can use SYS(2015) o a combination con SYS(3) for example.