If by "experimental" you mean "changes its behavior based on the experience of trying to open one file format first", I can agree with that description.
This is a practical, supported and proven procedure in use every day in production code. It is by no means "experimental" in the sense of not having been tried in a "real world" environment. "Dumping largely canned JCL into the internal reader" may not be a solution either in a real production environment under control of a commercial scheduling product. In the first place, the "dumped" job is not even on the radar of the scheduler; it has no notion that something besides itself has submitted a job, much less to where, and AFAIK has no facilities to track and report the results or behavior of such jobs. Not to mention that jobs "dumped to the internal reader" may not get the security product authority needed to perform the required functions. Many are the professionally audited shops where "internal reader" jobs are summarily stripped of any production authority regardless of the submitter's privileges to prevent any chance of unauthorized privilege elevation. OTOH John M. implied that this may not be a "production" situation but rather an "ad hoc" one, and therefore perhaps not controlled by a scheduler product, which would make an internal reader solution feasible, assuming the foreknowledge of the input RECFM as you said. Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Gilmore Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 1:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SORT? need. Do you need Peter Farley's experimental approach? You do if even the job submitter will not know the input-file RECFM. If someone will know it, and, say, PARM='RECFM=FB|VB' can be supplied, a simple COBOL program that dumps largely canned JCL into the internal reader will solve your problem. The function of the internal reader is to cope with generated JCL; and the generation required here is trivial. -- This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
