Files that are not indexed in our shop are usually LINE SEQUENTIAL and it is never necessary to look for x'0a' or x'0d'.  When reading files without these characters from other sources, we have read them as SEQUENTIAL when we were sure of the record length.

My question concerns a file with fixed length records except there is a short header in front of the first record.  Is there a way to specify how many characters to read outside of the record layout?  I got past this problem by defining a one character file so I could get past the header separately from the records where I performed a read in a loop to create the record in working storage.  It worked, but is there a better way to tackle this?

Thanks in advance.