In the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION of a program, you describe the aspects of the program that depend on the computing environment.
Use the CONFIGURATION SECTION to specify the following items:
Use the FILE-CONTROL and I-O-CONTROL paragraphs of the INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION to:
The terms file in COBOL terminology and data set or HFS file in operating-system terminology have essentially the same meaning and are used interchangeably in this information.
For Customer Information Control System (CICS) and online Information Management System (IMS™) message processing programs (MPP), code only the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION header and, optionally, the CONFIGURATION SECTION. CICS does not allow COBOL definition of files. IMS allows COBOL definition of files only for batch programs.
related tasks
Specifying the collating sequence
Defining symbolic characters
Defining a user-defined class
Defining files to the operating system
related references
Sections and paragraphs (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)