"Shahan, Ray" wrote: > Long ago and far away, the IBM's COBOL compiler would fail (severe error) if > it did not find a CLOSE statement for each OPEN statement in a COBOL > program...don't know if this still the case for IBM, nor do I recall if this > is/was an ANSII standard? I don't recall anything in the standard that requires a CLOSE statement to be present, at least from the 1985 standard onward. The compiler might want to warn you about a missing CLOSE statement, but I'd say it's a bug if any modern compiler failed to generate code because of it. Walter * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, * * etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *