Try something like:

 01  GETINFO-PARM-FIELDS.
     05  GETINFO-INFO-STRING     PIC  X(20)  VALUE  SPACES.
     05  GETINFO-INFO-LENGTH     PIC S9(04)  COMP   VALUE  20.
     05  GETINFO-PARM            PIC S9(04)  COMP.
     05  GETINFO-RESULT          PIC S9(04)  COMP.
....
     CALL  INTRINSIC  "GETINFO"  USING   GETINFO-INFO-STRING
                                         GETINFO-INFO-LENGTH
                                         GETINFO-PARM
                                GIVING   GETINFO-RESULT.
     IF  GETINFO-RESULT      <>  0
         DISPLAY  "'GETINFO' INTRINSIC FAILURE; RESULT = "
                  GETINFO-RESULT
                  "; GETINFO-INFO-STRING = ",  GETINFO-INFO-STRING
                  "; INFO-LENGTH = ",  GETINFO-INFO-LENGTH
                  "; PARM = ",  GETINFO-PARM
         CALL  INTRINSIC  "QUIT"  USING  \1\.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Emerson, Tom" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 11:14
Subject: SIMPLE (?) cobol question


Greetings -- I'm feeling moderately dense this morning, trying to use/remember
a feature of COBOL that I haven't touched in years (nor can I find in the
docs), and digging through tons of source [mostly not my own] to find an
example to trigger the "Aha!" memory is not proving very fruitful...

     How do I get the value of the "parm=" passed on the run command?(*)

I know that (via the "special names" SW0-SW15) I can get specific BITS of the
run parm, but I thought there was a way to get the run-parm proper.

basically I'm writing a utility program to retrieve some chunk of data based
on a single 3-digit key value; rather than force my jobstreams to look like:

   !run getdata.prog
   123

[which means my program has to deal with display/accept statements and error
handling], I want to use

   !run getdata.prog;parm=123

[which will automatically be "available" and of the proper type/range/etc.]

Am I nuts to think that the parm/info values are easily available in HP-COBOL,
or did I write some long-lost utility chunk of code to manually reconstruct
the "runparm" based on the SWn values and simply forgot "it's not part of what
HP offers..."?

Tom

(*) by the same token, how does one get the "info=" string?  Not that I need
it for this program, but I might as well "refresh" that section of
cranial-core :)

p.s.  Where did the (slightly better) 5.5 version of the mpe/ix docs page go?
I had it bookmarked, but it comes up with a page-not-found; the current
6/6.5/7 version actually went a bit "backwards" with the functionality [and,
for that matter, the 6/6.5/7 version points to a 5.0 version of the COBOL
manuals...]