i do not see this behavior (running Vfp6.0 Sp5), comes up just the way it is supposed to be. the cursor contains the fields with a length equal to the source table.

>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?