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Hi Giovanni,
We have investigated this idea internally and we believe a well rounded solution will be hard to achieve for this one.
Reason being, PUTENV is a general facility to set environment variables and what is being set could be done anywhere in the application via pointers
(as shown in https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.4?topic=variables-example-setting-accessing-environment for PUTENV),
passed in from another program or a JCL parameter, ACCEPT’d, read from a file or database, etc.So, we could have both false positives (saying PUTENV is not ok when it’s innocent) and false negatives (saying PUTENV is ok when it’s not).Even if we can alert people via a new compiler option to disallow or warn users of potential issues with PUTENV, someone can link in a call via any other language
or accesses dynamic allocation via SVC99, DYNALLOC, etc. So we feel a PUTENV solution gives a false sense of security. As a result, we are not convinced a new compiler option would help a lot.As you have discussed with us, there is a workaround which is to write an exit that intercepts the inclusion of the affected routines PUTENV etc, following the linkedit step, blocking the production of the load. We agree that this detection is a good thing but it comes with the drawbacks mentioned.Due to the above reasons, we will be rejecting this idea.
This idea is being reviewed further.