why is Display statement displaying in this way?

[Roderick Clay <rearlclay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello.  I'm new to this list, so hope my question(s) are no breach of 
any protocol.

I am a long time COBOL programmer, but just started using GNUCOBOL on my 
Linux Mint machine recently. This is a small thing, but it's got me 
puzzled! I have a few Display statements in the program I've been 
working on the last 2 days and they are displaying in a way I have NEVER 
seen a Cobol Display statement display before. EVERY display spills over 
onto a 2nd line. And it always spills over onto the 2nd line where a 
space appears in the record I am displaying. It is NOT a control 
character. I've done a hex dump to confirm that. It is always a space. 
But it could be the first space in the record, or the 2nd, or the 3rd, 
or the 4th, etc. And it displays sometimes just a few characters on the 
first line, sometimes quite a few more than that.  There doesn't seem to 
be any discernible pattern to when the display spills over onto the 2nd 
line.

Well, I finally figured out that the Display statement is using the 
defined maximum length (very long) of my variable length record rather 
then the actual length of the record (pretty short) (and which I've 
verified that it has correctly).  Why is this? Why doesn't the Display 
statement display the record only up to its known length?  Also, why is 
it displaying one piece of the actual record on one line, then 
displaying the rest of the actual record on the 2nd line? Why isn't it 
displaying the entire variable length record as is, with the actual 
content of the record first on the first line, then the rest of the long 
maximum length (filled with spaces) on subsequent lines?

If anyone has any insight into any if this, it would be much 
appreciated. (BTW, now that I've changed the definition of the record to 
be a much shorter maximum length, it displays just fine on one line.)

Thank you.

Rod