On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 17:45:02 -0400, Gerhard Postpischil wrote: >On 9/19/2013 3:06 PM, Doug Henry wrote: >> Of course their are methods to default the number of directory >> blocks. One that easily comes to mind is dataclass. But isn't all of >> this something that occurs during allocation and open is to late. >> Unless you create at least one directory block for a pds , what good >> is it? > By analogy, unless you create at least one record in a PS data set, what good is it? Therefore, DSN=NULLFILE is pointless.
I have occasionally created empty PDSes (usually temporary) to use in overriding concatenations. If there are no members, it's silly to require that there be directory blocks. No, I'll change my mind. Conventionally the member list is terminated by a high-values member name entry. If that entry can't be created, allocation should report an error. >Not that I'm proposing it, but OPEN could be modified to check for an >immediate EOF (or 0 DS1LSTAR) and abend or create a default number. > Please don't propose that. If there are no members, all the programming interfaces should simply report that there are no members. A very few years ago, ISPF development acceded to user wishes (far from unanimous) that displaying a member list when there are no members should simply display an empty member list panel, not report an error (Guess which side I took.) (But an attempt to access ZLAST for an empty member still returns RC!=0, rather than quietly returning 0 in ZLAST.) >Regardless, the current action would seem to be APARable as a security >exposure. > Hardly. IBM is likely to say that absent erase-on-scratch (Richard hinted), there's no guarantee of security. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
