> Yes, however FBS stands for Fixed Block Standard, not Spanned. Exactly. And the last record in an FBS data set can be "short", i.e. less than lrecl. The short record denotes the end of the data set. And all the utility programs know it and stop processing once they reach the short record. That is all fine and well as long as we are not dealing with a multivolume data set.
Think standalone dump written striped to - say - 5 volumes. Each volume has a data set in format FBS, but only one of the volumes can have a short record. SAdump knows that, and IPCS knows it, too. The utilities don't. So assume that you took a complete sadump to 5 volumes and the sort record happens to be on the first volume. Then you use a utility (ICEGENER is my favourite) to copy somewhere else. You end up with a severely truncated sadump. One fifth, to be exact. IPCS will read the truncated dump to the best of its abilities, but you will get all kinds of 'storage not available' warnings when looking at the dump. Last time a customer sent me an sadump, it had 27000cyl. I got all kinds of warnings and got lucky in that the sadump messages were clearly truncated and didn't show the 'successfully finished' message. It turned out that the wrong utility was used for copying, and the actual dump had 63000 cyls. Visible when IPCS COPYDUMP was used for copying. IPCS knows that a striped sadump can have the short record "earlier". Barbara ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
