IBM Mainframe Forum

That's what the ADV is about NicC. It adds the extra byte automatically.

I don't. I believe the system takes care of it by the way your write the lines to the file.

i.e. 'after page' 'after 1' 'after 2' etc....

But still - where does it put it? - and does the system write an ASA character or a machine character? - and what if you want to underline e.g. which is asa char +?

Hello,

From the COBOL manual:

Use NOADV if you already adjusted record length to include 1 byte for the printer control character.

Well you are not going to believe this.... Upon further investigation I fould two lines where they had used 'BEFORE'. I changed that to 'AFTER' and the file now comes out correctly as FBA and not FBM.

All is well... Thank you all very much for helping me figure this out.

Yup, we'd believe . . .

Thank you for posting the resolution

d

Yes, that'd do it.

For information:

Exclusively AFTER, you get FBA. Anything else (BEFORE or not specified, mixed or exclusive) you get the FBM.

With compiler option NOADV you need to specfify an extra byte at the start of the record for the control character, otherwise you will get the first character of your print record used as the control character. With ADV, the compiler inserts a byte for you, which you will not see in your program, but it's there...