OK, I just used COMBINE KEYLENGTH for the first time in a while, and
found that it doesn't complain about records that are too short the way
JOIN KEYLENGTH does. (Yay!) However, it also doesn't combine identical
short records as I expected it to. (Boo!)
I guess the workaround is simple enough, though. In most applications,
it's fine just to pad the short records with blanks. For the general
case, it just takes a conversion with SPECS V2C, for instance:
... | specs 1-8 v2c 1 "" 11 9-* 11
| join keylength 10
| specs 1-10 c2v 1 11-* 9
| ...
I was just startled (13 years late) that short records were treated
specially in different ways by the two stages.
¬R
