Ferhat, your  note is  very funny  indeed but does  not have  much useful
suggestions in it. I'm the one who wrote the line monitor and I believe I
know VM pretty well. The reason it monitors records and not bytes is that
this is  the only information that  is available. With VM/SP  5 or VM/XA,
you have access to  the number of disk blocks of a spool  file from a new
field in the first  spool block. To read that field the  file must not be
already opened and you must own  it; neither conditions holds true in the
case of RSCS.  With RSCS V2.2 and  the aforesaid levels of  VM, the block
count is provided  in some of the  messages, but not all.  Note that this
block count is still  not an indication of the time  it takes to transfer
the file, because  a file containing records of, say,  132 times the same
character  would take  very  little  time to  transfer  (because of  data
compression).
 
So,  it is  true that  monitoring  on the  number of  records is  stupid.
Unfortunately  this is  the best  that we  can do,  and it  is definitely
better than  nothing: in  practice, there are  *not many*  50,000 records
files  that contain  only 3  characters  per line,  and *a  lot* of  them
containing FORTRAN programs. The 5-10 users in the world who like to send
50,000 records of 3 characters will just have to wait, and I think that's
better  than making  tens  of thousands  of people  wait  for their  mail
because large files are being sent.
 
  Eric