Frequently I find that my select statements have truncated the length of a field.

For instance, I may have a table with a field customer.fname

and it will have "first name" records such as:
BO
GREG
TIMOTHY

Note the first record is only 2 characters long.

IF I

Select * from customer into cursor ccustomer

My cursor will contain records like:
BO
GR
TI

Because the first record defined the length for the entire table.

I work around this by using:

Select padr(fname,20,' ') as f_name  from customer into cursor ccustomer

but this becomes really tedious, not being able to use the wildcard * and having to refer back to the field lengths, especailly for tables with lots of fields. Is there a better way?