You will, I am all but certain, get a definitive answer from Mr. Y shortly. Allan Staller was, however, too diffident about his suggestion. Other more interesting uses for them are common now, but exits 15 and 35 were long ago notionally made available to delete unwanted unsorted input records from SORTIN and to exclude unwanted sorted records from SORTOUT. Thus, since E15 can count and E35 can delete, Mr. Staller's skeletal solution is entirely viable. Suppose that T records are counted by E15. Then E35 can delete the first D = min(0, n - T) records. Since I do not know the programming language in which these two exits are to be written, I cannot tell you how exactly to communicate T from E15 to E35 and n to E35, but I can think of several ways to do both even in COBOL. Post your exit-language choice if either of these requirements is problematic for you.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
