Effect on COBOL Rules

When you open a file for bulk addition, the regular rules of COBOL file handling are changed for that file, until that file is closed. The following changes apply:

  1. File status 02 (record written contains an allowed duplicate key value) is never returned by WRITE.
  2. File status 22 (record not written because it contained a disallowed duplicate key value) is not returned by WRITE. See the next section for a discussion of how illegal duplicate keys are handled.
  3. File status 24 (disk full) may occur on file verbs that normally cannot produce this status. This occurs because the verb (for example, READ) triggered writing of the keys to the file and the disk became full while doing this.
  4. Records may be rejected as having illegal duplicate keys that would not normally be rejected. The circumstance under which this occurs is described in the next section.