IBM Mainframe Forum

I have a perfect OUTREC coded which makes a date card for me. It's a single line of output, 80 bytes.

For now, I have a parm member as the SORTIN. That input member currently has one line in it, something like "SORT FIELDS=COPY".

I feel a little exposed about putting this into prod, because someone might change that parm card to have more than one line. I'll protect myself from that with a "stopaft" option, but then I thought that someone might DELETE that parm.

So I'm wondering if there is a graceful way to have a dummy file in, but get a single record out.

Yes, you can use TRAILER1 to do that. For example:



If you need more specific help, tell me the RECFM and LRECL you want for your output file, and what exactly you want in the output record.

Of course... much more elegant.
Here's what I ended up with after changing my DATE1 and TIME2 variables from the OUTFIL into DATENS and TIMENS:


Which gives the desired output of:

Good to talk to you again Frank.

Ed,

I'm glad I could help. BTW, the 80:X in TRAILER1 has no effect. The length is taken from BUILD, or from SORTIN if there's no BUILD, not from TRAILER1.