As Víctor says, it is potentially dangerous to force a file close.

What I did was with pure VFP code: if a file with a special name exists (I used "maintenance.tmp"), this is a sign that the application should be shut down, for maintenance.

(1) A Timer in the application checked every two minutes whether this file exists. If it exists, it will invoke goProgram.OnQuit() (this is the appropriate method in the Visual Extend framework). In theory, this solution is not perfect. If there are pending changes, the application will not quit immediately; the user will see the dialog for saving pending changes, instead. However, this didn't cause me trouble in practice.

(2) On application startup, the application also check for this file. If it exists, the user will get an error message, and the application will quit immediately.

Finally, I tried to do database maintenance, as much as possible, at midnight. But for some emergency repairs (like reindexing when there was an index corruption), I had to institute the procedure outlined above.

>Hi,
>
>In order to index/reindex a dbf file, we must open that
>dbf file exclusively.
>
>However, in some case, the file to index/reindex is open by
>other, therefore, is any Win32API to force the other party
>to close the file that we want to index/reindex so that
>we can proceed to index/reindex that file.
>
>Any example is appreciated. Thank you