Here’s a tip for those readers who, like me, still have to use the full-screen, green-screen debugger. I accidentally discovered that RPG supports a debugging option that is not documented in either the help text or the RPG programmer’s guide.

If you want to break a program or procedure when a variable has a certain value, you can use a conditional breakpoint. In the following example, the program breaks at statement 12 if variable STATE has the value TX.

break 12 when state = 'TX'

Suppose you want to stop when part of a field contains a certain value? The

In EDTF and End-of-Line Delimiters, you demonstrated a method for removing carriage-return characters from end-of-line delimiters in stream files. Unfortunately, your method only works in interactive jobs. I need to do the same operation on a file that I need to FTP. Do you have a way to remove these characters in batch?

–Chuck

You have pointed out yet another violation of Holt’s Law of Interactive Programs, which states: “The problem with interactive programs is that you can’t run them in batch.” I have a few methods for you, Chuck. First, here’s one from Shalom Carmel, a really sharp

Ironically, one of the problems with iSeries Access for Windows is also one of its strengths: its longevity. Starting out as a product called PC Support/400 in the late 1980s and progressing through at least three different name changes, this software has a history so long that it’s almost geology. However, sometimes that history works against it, particularly when administrators who are not familiar with i5/OS and OS/400 are in charge of installing and maintaining iSeries Access for Windows desktops.

To alleviate potential problems when Windows administrators handle IBM‘s connectivity package to AS/400, iSeries, and i5 servers, here are