Recovering Deleted Records

The deleted function recovers records that have been marked as deleted, but which have not yet been overwritten by a new record. This function can be used only with Vision 5 and Vision 6 files.

The -deleted option looks for records marked as deleted and writes their contents to a sequential file. For example:

vutil -deleted -vb infile.vis outfile.seq

reads through the list of deleted record areas in infile.vis and writes the data to outfile.seq in the form of a sequential file with variable length records and a portable record header that indicates the size of the record.

The file containing the deleted records may be loaded back into the Vision file with vutil -load, or opened by the runtime like any other sequential file.

Note: The deleted function works only with Vision 5 or Vision 6 files.

The command syntax is:

vutil -deleted [-v] [-b] [-t] [-q] source destination
-v creates a file that contains variable-length records.
-b creates a binary sequential file that is compatible with the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime.

If the -v option is also specified, variable length records are written. Otherwise, fixed-length records are written.

-t creates a line sequential file. This option always writes variable length records.
-q    tells vutil to perform all actions without prompting the user for input. This is useful when running vutil -deleted as a batch job.
source is the name of an existing Vision 5 or Vision 6 file.
destination is the name of the file to be filled with the recovered data.

By default, recovered records are written in a machine dependent binary sequential file format that is not compatible with the runtime. To create a file that is compatibility with the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime, include either the -b or -t option.