IDENTIFY statement

The IDENTIFY statement specifies any data you supply be entered into the CSECT identification records (IDR) for a particular control section. The statement can be used either to supply descriptive data for a control section or to provide a means of associating system-supplied data with executable code. The syntax of the IDENTIFY statement is:

IDENTIFY          sectionname('data')[,sectionname
                          ('data')]...

sectionname: The symbolic name of the control section to be identified.
data: Specifies up to 80 EBCDIC characters of identifying information for program objects, and up to 40 characters for load modules. You can supply any information desired for identification purposes.

Placement: An IDENTIFY statement must follow the module containing the control section to be identified or the INCLUDE statement specifying the module.

The syntax rules for the operand field are:

Blanks are not allowed between the CSECT name and the left parenthesis.
No blanks or characters are allowed between the left parenthesis and the leading single quotation mark nor between the trailing single quotation mark and the right parenthesis.
The data field consists of from 1 to 80 characters for program objects and 1 to 40 characters for load modules; therefore, a null entry must be represented, minimally, by a single blank.
Blanks can appear between the leading single quotation mark and the trailing single quotation mark. Each blank counts as 1 character toward the character limit.
A single quotation mark between the leading quotation mark and the trailing quotation mark is represented by 2 consecutive quotation marks. The pair of quotation marks counts as 1 character toward the character limit.
The IDENTIFY statement can be continued. If you are using the binder, the data characters end in column 71 and continue at column 2 on the next line.
If a leading quotation mark is found, all characters are read in until a trailing quotation mark is found or the character limit is reached.
A blank following a comma that terminates an operand also terminates the operand field for that record.
Double-byte character set (DBCS) characters can be included within the descriptive data. DBCS characters must be delimited by the shift-out (X'0E') and shift-in (X'0F') characters. The shift-out and shift-in characters and the delimited DBCS characters count as one or two bytes, respectively, toward the total length of the string.

You can provide more than one IDENTIFY statement for each control section name when you are creating a program object. However, if you are creating a load module, you can provide only one IDENTIFY statement. If you provide more than one IDENTIFY statement per control section for load modules, the information on only the last IDENTIFY statement is saved. The contents of each IDENTIFY statement will be saved in a separate record in the program object.