Rules of file numbers

[Janitor]

Could someone give me a brief description of how the file numbers work in manipulating files (i.e. opening, reading, writing, closing)? One particular that I am interested in: are the file numbers particular to the program involved or global to the machine? Thanks.

[MartinLiss]

I assume they are particular to the program running. I'm going to guess that you are concerned with assigning a number already in use. If that's the case, always use code like the following:

    
    intFileNbr = FreeFile
          
    Open MyFile For Input As intFileNbr _File

------------------
Marty

[Janitor]

Actually, I ran into a problem that I was hoping I could help solve with this answer. I have a program that goes through a couple of web pages, finds a particular page, pulls and formats the page, and saves it as a text file. During a run, I spawn about 15 of these programs. The problem is that occasionally two of the programs seem to write to the same file. I am currently using FreeFile, but was wondering if this could be a problem with grabbing and writing to the same file number. Thanks.

[MartinLiss]

Could you solve your problem by appending a unique number (perhaps the spawned number) or string to the file names?

------------------
Marty

[Janitor]

Thanks for your help. I actually discovered that my problem was else where. Additionally, according to the MSDN help (which I failed to scour earlier), file numbers are exclusive to the program. I guess I need to hunt better.