With external filename assignment, the filename is specified in the SELECT clause as follows:
select filename
assign to external external-file-reference
where the parameters are:
| filename | The filename of the file that is to be assigned. |
| external-file-reference | A COBOL word that identifies the specified file to the external environment for possible further mapping. If external-file-reference contains one or more hyphens, all characters up to and including the last hyphen are ignored. |
For further details on run-time system filename mapping, see the section Filename Mapping.