Thanks for the response.

The reason I need the intrinsics is that Cobol requires that the file be correctly defined in order to use Cobol to open it.

To open a KSAM file, for example, you must define all the keys for the file in the Cobol program. 

I want to be able to open any input file (or almost any file) without the program knowing any of the file characteristics until it is opened.

Then I want the Cobol program to be able to create a new output file from scratch, using only the characteristics of the input file.

So I can't build the file characteristics into the program using Cobol constructs.

Think of it as similar to what FCOPY does.

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