Problem:

Customer used to have the COBCAP environment variable,  Now, however, the variable no longer exists. What can be used instead?

Resolution:

COBCAP was an old means of mapping external file names which was retained for backward compatibility. It was superseded (and its use was deprecated) about 10 years ago, and it was finally dropped from Server Express in 2001.

COBCAP was replaced by the ASSIGN "EXTERNAL" directive (or the EXTERNAL reserved word in the ASSIGN clause of a SELECT statement), along with an environment variable or a configuration file to create the exact mapping of logical name onto physical name. For full details and examples of filename mapping and assignment, please refer to the Server Express File Handling Manual.