Re : CMD Parm

[peteh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Pete Hall)]

>>  What is the purpose of passing a variable of length
41 and in the called pgm receiving it as a parameter of length 40? What
is the theory behind this? <<

Venu,

It's important to make the distinction that the CL CALL is a command,
not an operation. Since the parameter data will get truncated to the
first non blank character, the non-blank positioned just past the
receiving program's declared parameter length will force the intervening
bytes to be blank filled. Since the parameter data is external to the
program (passed by reference) the receiving program will never the see
the extra byte, but will receive a blank filled value, which is what's
needed anyway. This is a limitation only of the CALL command when used
from a command line or in the CMD parameter of SBMJOB when the parameter
length is greater than 32 bytes. When used in a CL program, parameters
point to storage in the calling program's data space, so this limitation
doesn't apply, and if you create your own command, you can declare the
length (in the command) to be anything you like. The value passed will
not be truncated.

CL's CALL functions something like this:

program to program - pass a pointer to the caller's data space

command line       - Copy the value of the caller's data to a system
data space. Since the length of the data is not known (AS/400 parameters
are actually system pointers and don't have data attributes), trim
trailing blanks. If the length of the trimmed data is <= 32 bytes, use
the minimum size of the parameter data space (32 bytes). If it's longer
than 32 bytes, allocate enough storage to hold the data value.

SBMJOB CMD parameter - same as command line.

Anyway, that's the way I've always looked at it.

hth
Pete


--
 - Pete Hall peteh@earth.inwave.com
http://www.inwave.com/~peteh/

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