If I understand this right, the fact that the char string is a filename doesn't really matter (since the file doesn't have to exist). So, correct me if I am wrong but it sounds like you want to determine whether a string would be matched by a 'regular expression' (a wildcarded fileset). If so, then the posix function regexp() should be able to help. (Calling it from COBOL might be a bit of a challenge :-) John Pollard wrote: > > I am writing a program which will be testing to see if a file is a member > of a fileset. To keep it simple, I'm starting with only MPE-syntax > files/filesets and I am accepting only the "@", "?" and "#" non-file-name > characters in the fileset (so no ranges of characters). > > Is there an existing callable library routine which would make this > determination? If not, does anyone have pseudo-code which might guide me? > The only problem I see at the moment is handling multiple commercial at > signs (@) in a given portion of a fileset; such as: myfile.a@[log in to unmask] > > Just to make it a little trickier, this is a Cobol program, so recursion is > out for any inline code.