Hello all,

I've just come across an interesting foible with the ADIR() function.

I have a folder that contains 21 files. 10 of them are named 'SUPP_NCOA_XXXXXXXX.OUT' and 11 are named 'SUPP_XXXXXXXX.OUT'

The eight X's are a random string (using SUBSTR(SYS(2015), 3, 10))

I am trying to use ADIR() to populate an array with all the shorter filenames. To do so I run the following:

LOCAL lnFiles
lnFiles = ADIR(laMyFiles, 'c:\mydir\supp_????????.out')

The returned array should contain all 11 of the files with shorter names as the '?' wildcard represents only 1 character.

However, the array contains not only those 11 but also the first four (chronologically) of the files with the 'NCOA_' string within the name. In theory this is impossible as the eight question mark wildcards would force the exclusion of these four files on account of the extra five characters.

Can anybody help shed any light on why this happens. I have reproduced the effect on two machines, both running VFP 6.0 sp5 on Windows 2000 sp3. In both cases only the first four of the erroneous files are found in the resulting array.

Many thanks for any help/advice that might be given,

Regards,

Ben Sugden