Multiple COBOL Installations

[Roger Lavender]

To the best of my knowledge a single server can have multiple COBOL installations.

For example:

/opt/cobol20 --> containing version 4.1.20e
/opt/cobol30 --> containing version 4.1.30e
/opt/cobol40 --> containing version 4.1.40e

Given the proper environment variable settings, it is possible to have different ORACLE versions pointing to different COBOL versions by building the the rtsora files to point to the relevant cobdir/coblib paths.

For example:

ORACLE 8i ---> /opt/cobol20
ORACLE 9i ---> /opt/cobol40

Is there anything "internal" to this type of COBOL installation that requires that the COBOL path must be "/opt/cobol"?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

What you are doing is possible. There are a few things that default to /opt/cobol but can easily be overridden by setting ENV vars.
I assume that this is MicroFocus COBOL, so for example, unless you set COBDIR, it defaults to /opt/cobol.

[susan gregory_1]

The Object COBOL product does require that COBDIR, SHLIB_PATH and PATH be set and as long as they all point to the correct directories within the same product version, that should work fine.
The version that HP provided did have a copy_release script that would allow multiple versions to be installed on one machine.
The potential problem I see is that Oracle 9i seems to require Server Express, not Object COBOL as the (default?) libraries, etc seem to be of type ELF-64, which is an executable type that Object COBOL (all versions of 4.1 cobol) is not equipped to deal with.
The current version of Server Express is 2.2.SP1 and is capable of creating ELF-64 objects.
Were you able to get PA-RISC 1.1 or 2.0 executables/objects/libraries for Oracle 9i from Oracle?

[Roger Lavender]

The question was a "sanity" check of sorts. I do have this envirnment working on a software development server and it works (ELF-64 and ServerExpress issues not withstanding).

Thanks A. Clay and Susan for your confirmations.