I understand. I've made the appropriate changes to my program and it is functioning as expected and required. A couple of observations:
1. I used "STRING ... x"00" INTO pattern-text" vice your "SET ..." as this will work on native and managed platforms with no code changes.
2. I identify "." and ".." returned by _READ when scanning for folders by counting the iteration of _READ, the first two returns will be "." and ".." respectively?
3. A suggestion for an enhancement to the _READ behavior that would probably help users of this call on the native platform (those that don't have access to "my-field::TrimEnd"): Could the length of the string returned in f-entry-name be returned in f-max-len? I realize that it would mean f-max-len would have to be set to the length of f-entry-name prior to every call to _READ, but it would make any program that has to know the location of the end of the returned string within f-entry-name cross-platform with no differences in code.
As always, thank you so much for your assistance.