>>A more important thing: are we sure that the new file handle number will be higher than all the other numbers previously used? How do we know VFP won't recycle them?
>
>I've never paid attention to the actual handle numbers returned, in general they are pretty meaningless to all but the O/S. I actually do very little with the LLFF. I'm much more fond of TEXTMERGE to create files and APPEND FROM to a cursor or memo field to read files. The only time I use LLFF is if the data is binary.

So am I, in exactly the same order. LLF are nice, though, for conversions from weird formats, and reading long text files without much need to do global replaces in them. My preferrable combination is having a text of something in a memo, FCreate()ing couple of LL files, then switching _text variable to them alternatively, then appending them back into the memo and finally spitting the memo back to disk. Then it's called "code generator" :)