>I am writing an application that will FTP to and from an IBM running MVS. I want to check that MVS file id is valid, i.e. that is has the format aaaa.bbbb.cccc.dddd. That is that that each node (aaaa,bbbb,etc) is a most 8 characters, each node starts with a letter, ther is only one period "." between each node, does not end with a period, does not have spacces un the MVS file id. I have two questions:
>
>1. Did I leave anything out?
>2. What is the best (most efficent way of doing thsi?

The best way to do such type of validations is to use regular expressions. The problem only is to write correct one. :)