> -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ulrich Krueger > Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 1:16 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: JCL parms > > > You know, guys, as much as I'd like to see the JCL PARM > expanded in length, > I'd hate to see the problems that will arise from it. Face > it, how many of > your programs that process PARM values have a hard-coded > 100-byte storage > area to receive the PARM string into? Just about all of them, I bet. > > I move to leave PARM alone. If you were to mess with it, > you'd probably get > all sorts of incompatibility issues, just like we had with Y2K dates. > > How about something new instead: the "SET" JCL -statement is already > available. > e.g. //S1 SET P1=ABC,P2=123456 etc. > > IIRC, you can have as many SET statements in your JCL as you > need and you > can name each variable to just about anything you want (with a few > restrictions, I believe). > (And I'm just not sure about the length of each variable at > the moment.) > > So, all we now need would be a supported method to get at > each SET variable. > How about something like a Language Environment callable > service. You tell > it the variable name to retrieve (e.g., P1) and it returns > the variable's > length and starting storage address (or a non-zero return > code if not found > or length zero)? > With this information, your program can now process all the > parameters it > needs to know about without having to be afraid of exceeding > the PARM length > limitation. > And there'd be no impact on traditional PARM processing, either. > > > > Regards, > Ulrich Krueger
>From what I understand, any "variables" set using the SET JCL command are simply used for textual replacements during JCL conversion and are not available at execution time via any API. What might be nice would be an extention of the UNIX "Environment Variable" concept so that they can be set via JCL, then accessed via the UNIX APIs already in z/OS. // ENVVAR name=value or maybe //name ENVVAR value Or, to be more UNIX'y //name EXPORT value // EXPORT name=value // UNSET name //name SETENV value // SETENV name=value // SETENV name= The EXPORT and UNSET are for the Bourne Shell people. The SETENV is for the tcsh shell people. -- John McKown Senior Systems Programmer HealthMarkets Keeping the Promise of Affordable Coverage Administrative Services Group Information Technology The information contained in this e-mail message may be privileged and/or confidential. It is for intended addressee(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, reproduction, distribution or other use of this communication is strictly prohibited and could, in certain circumstances, be a criminal offense. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender by reply and delete this message without copying or disclosing it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
