Michael,

Without looking at your code it is a little hard to tell, but looks like you might have a problem with the part of the program that determines whether any output should be created.  Perhaps the program is trying to write the output, even though there are no qualifying inputs.

How big is this program?

Boris

>>> "ABOOTORAB,MICHAEL (HP-PaloAlto,ex1)"              <[log in to unmask]> 07/28/99 08:05PM >>>
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