Arriving at junk values in my file

nithivenkat · New User Joined: 15 Sep 2008 Posts: 22 Location: Mumbai

Hi,

My file has first 3 records as header.
Say for example if the total records in my file is 10, then the first 3 records will be headers and the remaining 7 will be detail records.

Now in my JCL - sortparm I have to extract only the detail records which will be processed in my cobol program.

Since we are not sure of the data in the header, we are simply skipping the first 3 records like below.
SORT FIELDS=COPY,SKIPREC=3
END
The output of this file (generated based onabove sort) is used in my cobol program.

My program does a check if the input file is empty [in the sense if the original input file has only headers and are skipped] it should abend. But it is not abending because of some junk being present. Can some one help me how to resolve this problem.

Kindly advise.

vasanthz · Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 6:52 pm

Hi,

Can you show us how the input file looks like & the scenarios.

expat · Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 8:01 pm

Define junk

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 10:12 pm

and why are you wasting resouces to delete 3 records from a file,
that could be skipped by the cobol program.

and what do you mean by ABEND?

If you keep the 3 headers in the file,
that means the COBOL program will always have a file to read,
and starting with the 4th read, if end of file, issue a non-zero return code.

If you are using the old rookie trick of forcing an abend in a module,
you are again (second time) wasting resources.

dick scherrer · Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 10:13 pm

Hello,