Yeah, for such an important asset as z/OS, IBM sometimes seems to proceed without thorough thought.
It would be like if you bought a multi-million-dollar house and then one Saturday morning you just got out the Sawzall and a hammer and started building an addition without giving adequate thought to the design. If you look at things like the format of the DCB it becomes apparent that every OS-MVS-OS/390-z/OS design decision is going to be around for thirty or more years, so they might want to get it right. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 9:44 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Determining if DUMMY allocation Very irritatingly, however documented, allocation also quietly converts any allocation of "PATH='/dev/null'" to NULLFILE. Irritatating because '/dev/null' (you can fake it with a symlink) has some behaviors distinctly different from NULLFILE (for example in concatenations). This complexity is needless. I suspect it was added because some irresponsible designer reasoned, "'/dev/null' is somewhat like NULLFILE. We'll replace it with the latter to make it exactly like NULLFILE and satisfy the (unjustified) expectations of legacy MVS users." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
