Thanks for the reply. I am using 9i, but the files will be used only for querying, and are rather large, so there would be a bit too much of a performance hit to just use them as external tables.

To answer your first question, the data dictionary is exactly the same for each file. So what I am looking to do is to loop through every file in the directory, replace the table name in the control file, then invoke sqlldr.

*~-}hotyopa{-~*