On 9/23/2013 10:27 AM, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
Nowadays, might a viable practice be to scratch anything that's neither catalogued nor allocated?
I didn't want to write a monograph, but keep the response brief. The scratch program in question considers the (installation's) classification of the volume, the allocation or last use date, etc. Some volumes are classified as customer owned, and those either do not get cleaned automatically, or only on request. Storage packs may be used only with known high-level indices, etc. Sort work packs get cleaned unconditionally when not in use, ad nauseam.
An uncataloged data set on an SMS volume is a serious problem, better examined on a case by case basis. On a non-SMS volume it's fair game if it has a temporary name, or if it hasn't been used in some time we try to locate the owner and find out what the intent is. Conversely a catalog entry for a non-existent data set is removed during weekly clean up.
Has IBM published a warning that such data set names are reserved for IBM, and not to be used by application programmers, or does IBM rely on "common knowledge" of programmers to avoid them?
I'm not aware of a formal declaration, but the format is explained in several publications.
But I have run into an analogous problem with unlabeled tapes. IBM documentation (Tape Labels?) states that the system will generate unique serials for NL tapes, in the form Lnnnnn, but I've never met a customer who's aware of that. In one case a customer, working for a firm whose name started with L, had a tape overwritten due to bad naming.
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
