COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs

Program Execution
HP COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs—522555-006
12-4
ASSIGN Command
When a process begins executing, it obtains the current ASSIGN and PARAM
values from the Guardian environment, and can act on the information they
contain. See ASSIGN Command and PARAM Command. For additional
information on TACL run-time commands, see the TACL Reference Manual or the
Guardian User’s Guide.
If no run-time commands are specified, the file-control entries in the program are
used to associate the COBOL file names with file-system file names, and all
external switches but one are set to OFF. The only exception is the NONSTOP
parameter, which defaults to ON if the program was compiled with the NONSTOP
directive in the Guardian environment.
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When Commands Take Effect
Commands take effect when encountered and can be overridden by subsequent
commands. Keywords, file names, and numbers cannot be continued from one line
to the next.
•
COMMENT Run-Time Command
A COMMENT run-time command is available to include documentation in the
TACL command stream.
ASSIGN Command
This section applies to programs that were not compiled with the ENV LIBRARY or UL
directive. Programs compiled with the ENV LIBRARY or UL directive ignore ASSIGN
commands.
The ASSIGN command creates an ASSIGN message in your current run-time
environment. A process can use the information in an ASSIGN message to override
the file-system file name, or other attributes, of a file specified in the source program.
This command is fully discussed in the TACL Reference Manual.
When a process begins to execute, it can request its ASSIGN messages and use their
contents to modify the information it possesses about its files before opening them.
During the initialization of any process compiled from a COBOL source, the run-time
routines automatically handle any ASSIGN messages made available by the Guardian
environment.
Note. ASSIGN commands for files in a user library are ignored.