I'm working on a project to extract some information from archive file. I ran my program through MFCobol animator and I'm receiving
a status code of 39(file not compatible) when opening the file for input. I have tried just about everything, rebuild, convert, etc. but
I receive the same message. Any help would be appreciated. My system information is below:

HP-UX n1rims02 B.10.20 A 9000/899 1651451331 two-user license

Micro Focus Cobol Version is:

Cobol/HP-UX HP35326 B.12.40 Copyright Hewlett-Packard Co. 1989-2003
V4.1 revision 30 build 10/10/2 G; 01700. Run Time System O1UPK/BMB/01240D

cobol v4.1.30-e
PRN=O1UPK/BML:8b.i1.13.04
PTI=NLS
PTI=Y2K

It's been about 30 years since I last programmed in COBOL and I have idea what a COBOL animator is. So take this with a grain of salt.

But I would believe the error message. Either the program that is opening the file has defined it differently than the program that wrote it or the file has been corrupted. Unless the failing program has worked before, I would strongly suspect the former.

Thank for for taking the time to post. Is there a UNIX utility that could create a new copy of the file that would contain the correct structure? I think that all I need to do is re-create the data portion and do a rebuild to create the index. Any ideas?

Thank for for taking the time to post. Is there a UNIX utility that could create a new copy of the file that would contain the correct structure? I think that all I need to do is re-create the data portion and do a rebuild to create the index. Any ideas?

I would doubt that your data file was created by a unix utility. I would assume that another cobol program created it. I don't know what tools come with the microfocus cobol compiler. Bear in mind that I have used COBOL85, nor COBOL74 for that matter.

I do know HP-UX fairly well, and I've never heard of a HP-UX program to rebuild indexes for cobol indexed files.

Are you sure that you don't simply have a bug in the program that is trying to read the data? Has it run before? Does it now run on other data files? If both of those questions get a "yes", then you probably do have a corrupted data file. In that case, you need to restore the file from backup, or recreate it from scratch.

Um, and you don't need to post twice. Once will do it.

Thanks for the information, the program has been running in production for about a year. So I agree with you that there is a problem with the data file. Other than the command fh -i is that a command that will display all characteristics of the file? Like what operating system created, time date, etc.

I have never heard of fh so that must be a cobol thing of some kind. There are only the obvious unix commands like ls and od. ls can tell you about the inode and od can display the value of every byte in the file.