Hi! Richard,

On 21 Jan 10 06:51, you wrote to me:

 RW> Yah bummer, I lost Dbase IV and III both in the hurricane

On its way to you tonight (my time) is a belated CARE package.  Check your
insecure inbound files... fingers crossed...

 PQ>> Mmm.  You still have that NLSS.bat and the required utils?  I used
 PQ>> a thingy called 'IFNUMBER" to do range checking on command-line
 PQ>> input...
 RW> THere we go!!! WE're usually talking about single digit
 RW> numbers, so we're not talking a whole lot of parsing to do.

 PQ>> Is that what you had in mind, mate?

 RW> Maybe, but what happens to ifnumber I wonder if the bonehead that
 RW> invokes it types something which is an alpha string as the command
 RW> line parm?

Not sure.  There might be some cr*p on the local screen as IFNUMBER drops
its guts, though the errorlevel check(s) should catch the logic flow.

 RW> Have to try that and see what kind of choke we get. ONce I
 RW> know how it chokes, I"m golden. Could be kludged to force what I want
 RW> I think.  with dBase it was always the "picture" statement in a
 RW> program which forced the user to provide an acceptable string for
 RW> input, so that one could write programs allowing the minimally trained
 RW> to interact with dBase.

In 'the package' is a cute little doover I only just got the hang of back
in the day, called: Form Gen, -aka- FORm GEn (-aka- FORGE) that does *that*
either for Turbo Pascal or dBASE.

There's also a util called: dBMENU, but I don't remember doing much with it
though I have an inkling in my waters that I may have used it at work back
in the middle-90s.  You're welcome to throw it.  :)

Also included is a BBS door program by Harvey Parisien called: RADPLUS,
that may be useful; it's designed to manipulate .DBF files remotely, and to
run from a RA-style BBS but might be shoe-horned to your needs.  That
particular copy is the one I used to run prior to 1998 and had some
interaction with *one* user during initial testing.  (I don't have the
original archive, dammit.)

Cheers,
Paul.

... I gotta get a new computer.  This one makes too many mistakes.
--- GoldED+/W32 1.1.5-31012