COBOL binds by calling the core library like any other external routine, using the CALL statement with BY VALUE and BY REFERENCE as appropriate. This works on distributed COBOL — Micro Focus, GnuCOBOL and similar — where a USB device is physically reachable.
Where this applies, and where it does not
To be straightforward: this is for COBOL running on Windows, Linux or a Unix where a USB dongle can be attached. If your COBOL runs on z/OS, a USB device in a laptop is not the answer to your licensing question and we will not pretend otherwise.
Where it does apply, the usual situation is a vendor-supplied COBOL business application installed at customer sites, where the licensed instance count has drifted over the years and nobody can prove what it should be. A dongle per installation makes that countable again without rewriting anything.
Getting the library loaded
One deployment detail costs more time here than anything else. GnuCOBOL resolves CALL targets at run time through libcob rather than at link time, so linking the native library into the executable is not enough: name it in COB_PRE_LOAD, without its prefix or file extension, and point COB_LIBRARY_PATH at the directory holding it. Get that wrong and the failure is a module-not-found error at run time, which reads like a missing program rather than a missing library.
The binding ships as a copybook you COPY into working storage, carrying the status codes, the flag bits and the picture clauses, and is verified with GnuCOBOL 3.2.
Code
Runnable sample: cobol/verify-and-read.cbl. Binding source: bindings/cobol. Both are Apache-2.0, in the public SDK repository; the prebuilt native libraries are in the repository’s natives/ folder, one per platform.
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