[open-cobol-list] Reading cobol files from C

[Gerry Weaver]

Hello All,

I need some help from you cobol gurus out there. I need to access some 
MF cobol files from C. These files are report files. They are in sets of 
three. The first file contains a report category, the second contains 
report names and offsets, and the third contains the actual reports. 
There also appear to be some formatting bytes in the report file. Is 
this some type of standard cobol report format? If not, the thing I'm 
having trouble with are the four byte long values, which I believe 
represent file offsets. How does cobol store a long?

For example:

I have a case where two values to compute a report count. The hex 
values are below.

00 00 08 8f
00 00 09 3f

The cobol code subtracts the first value from the second, adds 1, and 
returns a value of 6 as the result.