>I'm not sure I'm explaining my newbie confusional state. If state is a field in the 'to' dbf, how does inlist check to see if it's one of the values in the inlist list, and then select only those records from the 'from' (txt) file?
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>Said another way, how do you filter the txt file based on a field in the dbf?
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>Let me know if I'm making sense here....

Yes, it's an interesting question. VFP does it somehow internally, even for text files. I guess, it's trying to append and then if it sees, what it's not in the list, it reverts. That's VFP internals, so we never would know for sure...