Michael Wanzong asks:

     I am trying to find a way to programmatically extract the version
     number stored in an XL file.

     Our XL's are made of COBOL subroutines.  One of these subroutines has
     a $VERSION compiler option.  If we run VERSION.PUB.SYS on the XL file
     the version information is displayed.  I just can't figure out how to
     get at it programmatically.

     Does anyone have any ideas?

You don't really wanna know, do you? :-)  Briefly, XLs consist of an
LST_HEADER which will point to a number of SOM_HEADERs which in turn
point to various AUX_HEADERS which in turn, point to string tables ...

Sorry, this gets pretty gorey and is probably too difficult to do from
scratch and in COBOL. You would need to invent the various header types,
etc. and is doable if you really want to pursue it. Having gone into
this level of detail when doing the gcc compiler, I would recommend
against it.

However, I would suggest that you programmatically invoke VERSION and
redirect the output of it to a temporary file that you can then open and
parse. Much easier to implement and support.

Regards,


Mark