Fellow Remediators:

Just wanted to share an experience with you from this weekend.

Consider the following JCL:

!FILE P3410U07 = F434100A0.WORK,NEW;REC=-144,16,F,ASCII;SAVE&
!                           DISC=164000,32,1

Now a common remediation to this file equation would be to change the RECORD
size to be 158,
which is our "Standard Flat File Record Size for Transaction With Their
Dates Remediated For Y2K".
In this case, we would change the code to read:

!COMMENT          FILE P3410U07 =
F434100A0.WORK,NEW;REC=-144,16,F,ASCII;SAVE&
!FILE P3410U07 = F434100A0.WORK,NEW;REC=-158,16,F,ASCII;SAVE&
!                           DISC=164000,32,1

This changes the file to the new size while showing the old file size in the
comment line
so any future remediator could see that this line had been changed.

Do you see the problem in this code?  It only took me 1/2 day of head
scratching to see
the obvious.  The symptom was that programs down stream in this and other
jobs, were behaving
.... erratically ... in their treatment of this file. Some acted like the
file was not even there.

The problem .... the & character at the end of the comment line caused all
three lines to be
treated as a comment, hence, no file equation was issued, so the file was
created in the
temporary file domain, instead of the permanent file domain, thus causing
all kinds of
problems for downstream entities.

Needless to say, I felt like a real dunce when I finally realized the cause
of this problem.
Hopefully, bringing this to the attention of the group will keep someone
else from
making the same dumb mistake.

For your reference, I have copied the official word from the MPE Programmers
Ref Manual
and pasted it below.  Its clear, I just forgot.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------
COMMENT

Inserts a comment into a command stream or user command.  (Native Mode)

Syntax

COMMENT [text]

Parameters

text                  Information composed of the comment text.  If the
                      last nonblank character is an ampersand (&),
                      comment text is continued onto the next line.
                      Default is that a record containing only the string
                      "COMMENT" is inserted in the command stream.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------

Hope all have a productive Tuesday morning.

Joe Howell
Joseph A Howell - The Maxim Group
PCN Y2K- The Progress Center - RTP
(919) 905-4187    ESN 355-4187