Communications Programs (EXPORT command)

Transmission of a portable file by a communications program may not be possible if the program misinterprets any characters in the file as control characters (for example, as a line feed, carriage return, or end of transmission). This can be prevented by specifying TYPE=COMM on EXPORT. This specification replaces each control character with the character 0. The affected control characters are in positions 0–60 of the IMPORT/EXPORT character set.

The line length that the communications program uses must be set to 80 to match the 80-character record length of portable files. A transmitted file must be checked for blank lines or special characters inserted by the communications program. These must be edited out prior to reading the file with the IMPORT command.