Computer Log

Fixed sort04.cob amounts and arithmetic on those fields after figuring out how IBM COBOL works with these fields. It was working but not displaying amount fields and I had left it that way until I understood why. By working I mean producing output and running to completion. So I guess I should really say it wasn’t working properly. Should have created data with proper amounts. Processing would have been easier by not including decimal in data so 01095 instead of 010.95. But it’s been many years since working with IBM COBOL. I think it wasn’t a problem with gnuCOBOL since this was a port of that source!

I mentioned here something odd and confusing to me. So played with it and certainly can work around it. However I still find it strange that in IBM COBOL, at least this very old version, I can’t move a field defined as 999.99 to another field defined as 999.99. I guess the answer simply is that’s the rule. This is a very old compiler, so as far as I know it may not even work this way any more.

Modified parseJob, my Hercules local prt file extractor (see here) to also parse prt00f.txt. For me prt00e.txt is most useful. There’s also a prt002.txt file, but I didn’t process because I haven’t seen it’s output yet.

Even though I said this wasn’t a high priority, I did some more work on my greenbar program. Seems to do a pretty fair job. Not exactly an example of my finest programming skills. A lot of trial and error rather than properly understanding the process. I think I understood it better a few years ago when I 1st started playing with it. Anywho…I’m looking to capture more of the nostalgic feel rather than an exact precision duplication of a greenbar listing. I think I did a pretty fair job. Probably needs more tractor holes among many other things. Works on the Hercules local prt file prt00e.txt AND GnuCOBOL files, especially when compiled with GnuCOBOL’s xref switch…looks very IBMish!

Here’s a GnuCOBOL example printed on the famous orange bar paper, so popular in IBM computer shops, for the fall season! Just kidding…no such paper as far as I know : )

It is so much easier to look at MVS Job output locally on Linux (taking into account the choices of tools and editors available) than on the TSO, 80 column 3270 terminal. If you specify MSGCLASS=A in your JCL your output gets sent to the Hercules local prt subdirectory. However Hercules just appends each output onto the end of the previous Job. So…I wrote a Python 3 program that reads the Hercules local prt00e.txt output on Linux which contains multiple jobs and splits each job out to it’s own file. There are more sophisticated ways of doing this on MS-Windows but I was unaware of anything that does this on Linux. One advantage my program has over the more sophisticated MS-Windows program is it can also be used for gnuCOBOL programs. It opens the print file, read-only and can run while Hercules is active. There is maybe a likelihood that there could be problems reading while Hercules is writing. So it’s probably best to run between Job execution.

Extracted files are named “JobName-JobNo (date&time).txt”

I had to add date & time because some Jobs with the same Job Name & Job Number appear multiple times. Such as the “MF1” job that runs on the TK4 system. It can be cancelled BTW! I usually do if I remember.

It’s fast too…
Read a 7+MB file with 80322 lines and wrote (extracted) 42 files (jobs) in less than a second.

There’s a possibility that I might revisit some work I previously did creating the nostalgic greenbar look. I could combine it with or add a option to this program. It’s certainly not high on my to do list. See this post for an example or search for greenbar for other examples of work I did on this, which also show some bluebar. Still needs much work though!