Andrew,

>If the files are of a reasonably small size, then I'd agree that this is a great way to go. If OTOH they "have ~250 fields and may be huge" then even as few as 100k records blows out to almost 500Mb - My guess is that Fox is going to start paging like crazy on most systems. Writing direct to the disk with LLF or SET TEXT (which is really just LLF wrapped up pretty-like <g>) would work better here IMO. It also saves two sets of I/O (just write rather than write/read/write).

Good points. My main point in posting the alternative (since Nadya asked about it) was to clarify the syntax of COPY TO that would help get to the end result, for the benefit of others who might need that approach. I agree size of files might be problem.