Greg,
        About 5 year ago I did a "c" program to do roughly what you are
after, I will have a look
for it and send you a copy. I'm not sure about cobol sorry.

        Could you not use the shell script of Posix.

        Sorry I could not be of more help.

regards,


*****************************
* Andrew G Dickinson        *
* Systems Analyst           *
* Welwyn Systems Limited    *
* Tel : +44 1670351532 x267 *
* Fax : +44 1670356580      *
*****************************

        >----------
        >From:  Stigers, Greg ~ AND[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
        >Reply To:      Stigers, Greg ~ AND
        >Sent:  27 September 1997 22:15
        >To:    [log in to unmask]
        >Subject:       Reading a bytestream file in COBOL
        >
        >What do I have to do to make this work? I just want to read in
one byte
        >at a time, and write it to our printer. The file is a series of
escaped
        >raster graphics and PCL. We have set the record length to 1,
and get EOF
        >after the first read on a 34,403 byte file. I can think of some
        >interesting tricks, but I would like to stick to either ANSI 85
COBOL,
        >or at least be able to isolate anything non-portable into
called
        >sub-programs. We are on 55, but do not have C/iX with which to
take
        >advantage of the POSIX Developer goodies. We would get g++ if
this would
        >save our bacon. We have few qualms with calling the C routines
from
        >COBOL, or more likely, from a COBOL sub-program.