Jon I’m not sure but I think what you are mentioning is a qsam vb put
But for BSAM I think one would need to account for the block As that is the big difference between bsam and qsam Qsam you don’t have to worry about blocking while BSAM you do Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> ________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Jon Perryman <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 1, 2026 10:07:52 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Question on RECFM=VBA On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 21:07:31 -0500, Joseph Reichman <[email protected]> wrote: >So first comes the BDW for 4 bytes It's been many years but if I remember correctly the BDW (Block Descriptor word) is not your responsibility and is maintained internally by write. >then comes next 4 bytes RDW While the RDW is 4 bytes, it is 2 bytes containing the length followed by x'0000'. >The 9 th byte would then be the control character The 5th byte is a carriage control character which has meaning to the printer. >If I move a 0 to BDW+8 it should space 2 lines >before writting the record No spacing occurs at write. Instead, the "0" will be the first byte of the record you are writing. >going to ISPF browse doesn’t seem that way as >the record appears right after ******** TOP OF DATA ***** I'm guessing that by "the record", you mean the first snap output line. I'm guessing that you placed x'00000001' in your BDW field which would be processed as the RDW where the length = 0 (first 2 bytes). Essentially an empty record. Even if you had x'00010000', realize the first byte of your rdw is x'00' and ISPF should show you a ".". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
