The simple answer, they did not know what they were doing, once they created a smal file and every time they ran out of space, they just created another one of the same size, go figure???

No, I do not have the luxury of any downtime, I have had a consultant reccomend to me that this is an easy thing to do while the DB is up so I thought I would ask.

I was planning on doing this consolidation as part of a migration to new hardware and oracle 10g, currently running 9i. My plan was to build a new db and the tablepaces, import the rows and tables, apply the edited indexfile then be up and running, the consultant I think spooked my already juttery boss and recommended copying the db over and running the convert script for 10g, he said it won't take but an hour or two, I have my doubts, but that would leave me the eventual task of cleaning up the messy little files.

keith