Somebody asked about echoing a single character to a file,
which they wanted to signify the type of backup that had
been performed.  I replied:

> I've just been experimenting with this sort of thing today
> (I want to have backup jobs and certain critical user-streamed
> jobs write a record of start and end times to an easily
> accessible global job log which is a flat file).  What
> you need to do is change the above to something like
>
> !setvar type "t"
> !if finfo ('butype','exists') then
> !     purge butype
> !endif
> !build butype;rec=-1,,f,ascii;disc=1
> !file butype=butype,old;acc=append
> !echo !type > *butype
> ! .... etc .....

Yes, as an afterthought, I've tried this.  You do indeed
need to change that to 'rec=-2' as a minimum, otherwise
the file system will report that it can't write to the
output file.  Curious that .... why can you successfully
build a file with rec=-1 if you can't write to it?

FWIW,
Ron
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