Important Notice
The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software,
purely for historical purposes.
If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming,
you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully
out of date.
Introduction to File-name Routines
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These routines enable you to parse a file-name into its
component strings and to join strings together to form a file-name.
They can be used together to replace components of a file-name, such
as the extension. They can handle both null-terminated and space-
terminated file-names.
A file-name is split up into device, basename and extension. For
example, in the following file-name:
D:dir1dir2file.dat
the device is "D:dir1dir2", the basename is "file", and the
extension "dat".
The routines can work with strings up to 65,535 characters long, but
your environment imposes a limit on the maximum length of a file-name:
DOS - 65 characters
OS/2 (with the shared run-time system, COBLIB) - 265 characters
OS/2 (with the static linked run-time system, LCOBOL) - 265 characters
Micro Focus COBOL for UNIX - 100 characters
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