>>But that would require additional work for VFP, to analyze if there are deleted
>>records in the first place. Assuming that there will usually be deleted records,
>>it seems much more efficient to do the PACK inconditionally.
>
>Given Ted and Tamar's statements in HackFox that there is a miniscule amount of time in which a failure could cause PACK to lose your table completely, I _much_ prefer the idea that it won't touch the file if there's nothing to do.

C'mon, Garrett. If that was truly a concern then all manner of PC applications would need re-writing. I also don't know why they say that performing the operations manually is still advised for FREE tables.