Question

From my COBOL program, I’m calling my C module which itself makes calls to a proprietary library. This library insists on writing to stderr, although there’s no stderr available since the main program is written in COBOL. Consequently, the program aborts with this message:

cannnot open stderr

The support guys at HP advised me to issue

PARAM SAVE-ENVIRONMENT ON

in TACL before running the program. This indeed solved my problem. However, my program will be used by several people in a number of scripts and I don’t want to force them to issue PARAM SAVE-ENVIRONMENT ON prior to running the program.

Is there some COBOL85 directive which allows me to properly run the program without changing any parameters manually? Something like

?PARAM SAVE-ENVIRONMENT ON

would be great…

EDIT:

Since I’m able to modify the C module (not the library), I’d be completely satisfied with a C-based solution. However, simply opening stderr before calling the library didn’t solve my problem.

Answer 1

PARAM SAVE-ENVIRONMENT ON makes HP COBOL-programs save environment variables (which they receive as messages at startup from Guardian) for future calls to getenv() from C modules.

Actually, the library I’m using tries to open stderr because it can’t read environment variables. One solution is to set the PARAM SAVE-ENVIRONMENT to ON, so getenv() will properly function again. This has to be done in each TACL session.

Unless: you use the ?SAVE STARTUP– or ?SAVE ALL-directive in your COBOL program to achieve the same effect.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t mix COBOL and C.
• Don’t use COBOL at all.