[open-cobol-list] opening variable named files programatically

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

I haven't posted for a month of more but I am plugging away with open 
Cobol every minute I can and loving it.

I have hit a roadblock, actually two, though

I am creating a program to help my son with his apraxia. He has a 
terrible time sequencing sounds. I believe that the English language is 
complicating his issues. There is a very poor mapping of sounds to the 
written the language and he is very visual.

I have spent quite some time making a respelling system for him. It is 
based on IPA. The international phonetic alphabet writes how words 
should be spoken.

For instance fox in IPA is fɒks.

There are too many characters in IPA to teach my son and there are too 
many similar characters which could confuse regular spelling. I have 
been trying to create a respelling system that is based on 44 sightwords 
I will teach him. I want him to be able to say parts of words.

So for instance, the A in face is different then the A in cat. Rather 
then using complex characters I want to print cat and face with the "A" 
highlighted and the rest of the word in lowlight, the whole word itself 
will become the special linguistic "character".

I have created 25000 files that look like this file named fox

fɒks
Fish
hOt
Kick
Sink


I want to read through the file line by line and call procedures to 
print sightwords stacked in such a way that they look like a vertical 
cross word puzzle word. His respelling system will be written 
vertically. The F in fish will be directly over the O in hot, the K in 
kick and the S in sink. f O K S will all be in the same color and the 
rest of the letters will be dim. The first line will not be printed, 
it's the IPA transcription and is there so I can error check.

I don't think it will be so hard to do this once I figure out how to 
open the files but right now I am stuck.

My first problem is being able to open files not hardcoded in the FD 
section. I haven't come across any examples of this. When he(or I) type 
in "lime" in an entry field, I want libcob to search through 25K files 
to open the correct one on the fly. and without any hardcoding. I don't 
know how to do this.

I don't want to have to have my cobol executable mixed in with 25K other 
files too. I can't seem to figure out how to open a file by it's full 
Linux path name.

I found this thread:
http://www.opencobol.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=1358&forum=1&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&start=10

and found Brian's suggestion and did this:

export LD_RUN_PATH=/cob/lookup

(I made a cob directory after root to keep the path name short)

if I echo $LD_RUN_PATH I get the correct results.

I have hardcoded a file named "food" for now into the program but it is 
not yet being found, I get error 35.

Could anyone point me to some more resources so I can read about how to 
do these two things?

Thanks for reading-Patrick