cobol1.hlp (Topic list)
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documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.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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