Johnny,

What error do you receive, if any? Because it could be that the acrual holding of the file is not the problem, but something else is preventing this. If you could provide some more info, we can try and help you solve it.

Well I feel stupid! Thanks Prarie; I never thought I could add the &MDYY and have it come out formatted so nice. I was all over the define and set trying to figure out how to pass the data. Thanks for the fast simple solution!

Johnny-U.

PART2:
I thought I could figure this out but I am at another loss. Now that I have some files listed:

MYOUTPUT_09232009.FOC
MYOUTPUT_09242009.FOC
..... and 1 more every 2 weeks

I am trying to use a wild card "MYOUTPUT_*.FOC" or something like that in a USE command so I can append them all into 1 table "MYOUTPUT". I can't seem to be able to use a wild card for this.

Johnny-U

No, you can't. But if you know the dates or can do a dir with a wildcard and pipe the output to a file, you can use a -REPEAT loop to read that file and populate the USE.

Waht you also could do, is writing the name of the hold file to another database (or flatfile or such) at the moment you create it. If you do this in a 'smart' way, the only thing you need to do is to -INCLUDE the flat file in your USE statement.
Suppose you would write to a flat file using APEND at the moment of creation of the hold file:
-WRITE INCFILE MYOUTPUT_&MDYY...FOC AS MYFILE
Then you would only need to do :
USE
-INCLUDE INCFILE
END
and you're done.
(In case you're wondering about the three dots: 2 are for the DM concatenation, the last one is the dot before the extension FOC).

I use the method that Ginny suggests as with the DIR command with wildcards, you can ensure that you have the latest information or those files that actually exist.

If you combine what Ginny suggests with what GamP suggests then you could create an "include" file post batch that you can use.

T

Thank you ALL! I'm working on it as we speak.