Rational Developer for System z
COBOL for Windows, Version 7.5, Programming Guide


Identifying files

In the FILE-CONTROL paragraph of the INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION of the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION, you must specify a name for the file that you want to use and optionally specify a name for the file system, as shown below.

SELECT file ASSIGN TO FileSystemID-Filename

file is the name that you use inside the program to refer to the file. It is not necessarily the actual name of the file as known by the system.

FileSystemID identifies one of the following file systems:

STL
Standard language file system
BTR
Btrieve (Pervasive.SQL) file system
RSD
Record sequential delimited file system

If you do not provide the file-system specification, the runtime option FILESYS is used to select the file system. The default for the FILESYS runtime option is STL.

Filename is the name of the physical file that you want to access. Alternatively, you can use an environment variable to specify the file-name at run time.

related concepts
File system

related tasks
Identifying Btrieve files
Identifying STL files
Identifying RSD files

related references
STL file system
RSD file system
Runtime environment variables
FILESYS


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