Try setting pattern-len to 256.
I see where the documentation says "Length of pattern string in the pattern-content field." But it also says "You can set pattern-length to less than the length of the pattern-content field, but not to more." In other Micro Focus library calls these length parameters specify the length of the associated buffer, not the length of the string in the buffer. Since our string lengths vary, we defaulted to always using the buffer length rather than finding the end of the string. And it has worked for our purposes since NE 3.0. Of course in native COBOL we got just "." and ".." as the file names, no path. So we would IF f-entry-name (1:2) = ". " OR ".." EXIT to skip these two returns from _READ.