Hi,

We have a software bug that is commonly known among our programmers as
black hole and I have been told its been going on for more than 4 years.

This is how the problem occurs :

A COBOL program reads in 2 files and after doing some editing writes the
result to output.

Occasionally output file contains null records ( black holes!)

The last time this problem occurred I noticed that there exactly 8 null
records,
I also noticed that the output file has a blocking factor of 8.
My solution to this problem is to change the blocking factor and it will
never happen again ( We have proven that our program is not causing this).

I am wondering if this has happened to anybody or if anyone can explain it.

The file equations are :

file in1 =  file1
file in2 =  file2

where file1 and file2 are :

  SIZE  TYP        EOF      LIMIT R/B  SECTORS #X MX

        600B  FA      220804    3300000   1   518192  * 32  file1
        600B  FA     2514082    6000000   1  5893280  * 32  file2


file out = out1;REC=-600,8,F,ASCII;DEV=DISC;DISC=4000000,32,1;SAVE      {
notice blk of 8)

RUN PROG1;XL='XL'

Thanks
Michael