>Hello Brett;
>
>I actually did not know, so I performed a few tests. Yep, the copy command fully executes before the next line in your program is executed. This makes good sense because VFP cannot possibly know whether your next executable instruction requires the results of your copy.
>
>This is still some disk activity at the time the next line executes, but I believe this is the result of Windows' buffering. The newly created table exists on the disk (in a buffer actually) as far as VFP is concerned.
>
>Regards,
>
>JME

Thanks for your time, so far on my side (collegues experimenting) they have the use statment failing. They explained to me they they have to add some code sometimes to check to ensure that a file is available before they can use it. I ask them if the code followed each other and they responded that it failed once when the copy file was followed by a use, but they also have a section of code that calls a method of an object that performs the copy file (amongst other code) and after executing that method a use is issued and he noted that the use failed because the file was not copied yet. He added code to ensure that it waits for the file to be present before the program continued.

We are going to experiment with copy file on varying sizes of files and see if that could shead some light on this problem.

Thanks for your help..