> A dirtier trick that comes to mind I am glad I dared to ask. Compared to my original idea I now have i) a much simpler way to achieve almost the same, and ii) a surprisingly tricky solution, at least for me. Both are really sophisticated in their way. Well, the 'prefix recno' could even be more simplified like this (to prevent the LITERAL|DUP * - machinery):
> "ADDPIPE (sep !)', > '*.input:", > '! spec *-* c2x 1', > '! fblock 2', > '! reverse', > '! fblock 1', > '! spec recno 1 *-* nf', /* column 1: Rec#, col2: data */ > '!*.input:' Thank you again. But in the current case I will make use neither of the two solutions. It turned out that it is of minor benefit to mark where the two pointers refer within the file I analyse. Furthermore with no EOF token in the data (file size is stored elsewhere) it would be overdone to bring this data to my REXX and check in there with all the overhead. From all that 'where-am-I' procedure remains after this weekend -- just to know when to quit -- a single PEEKTO. Ciao.....Mike -- www.Ok.de - die kostenlose E-Mail Adresse
