In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 01/02/2008
at 04:43 PM, Paul Gilmartin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>One might make the same argument about DSNAMEs
And I wouldn't argue with it.
>either way. NULLFILE could have been catalogued on an imaginary UNIT
Given that there's a device type for DUMMY, that would have been
reasonable.
>It's not a "problem", but a feecher:
The text that you quoted from the JCL RM does not say that it will be
treated differently from any other path defined as a null special file.
>>>What benefit of this distinct treatment of /dev/null justifies the
>>>resource spent on its implementation?
>I still wonder.
Off the top of my head, I'd say that it's broken as designed. Another case
of IBM's MVS, OMVS and Unix people not talking to each other, assuming
that you have verified the difference in behavior.
>I suppose that Unix community would expect the look and feel of Unix,
>even as the JCL community would expect the look and feel of JCL.
The look and feel of JCL was that there was only *one* special dsname.
handling PATH='/dev/null' differently from other Unix file names with the
same definition is *not* what an old time JCL user would expect. OTOH, if
the are treated the same, there's nothing wrong with the documentation
pointing out the canonical name.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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