Thanks for your feedback. Check out Dana's idea. I have numerous apps reading in/out flat file information from old VAX applications and in some cases low level reading is the only option. But, reading bytes & calculating record & file sizes within these can be a real pain. It also creates major maint. issues because every time a file is changed, all the calculations in the import routines must be changed also. By forcing the VAX programmers to give me comma delimited stuff I can avoid all that and just worry about the field order when things are changed. Then utilize append from etc. Unfortunately much of our information is large (hundreds of thousands of records) and can take a few minutes to get into tables so I have beed hurting for a way to let GUI users know something is going on. Calling the _Tally with the FOR is just the ticket.

Thanks.