On Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:01:27 -0400, Joe Testa wrote:
>From the JCL reference manual for the DD statement:
>
>[volume] serial-number subparameters (1 - 255):
>volume serial numbers (1 - 6 alphanumeric, $, #, @, or special characters)
>
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v2r1/topic/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.ieab600/iea3b6_Subparameter_definition60.htm
...
SER=serial-number
SER=(serial-number[,serial-number]...)
Identifies by serial number the volume(s) on which the data set resides or
will reside. A volume serial number is 1 through 6 alphanumeric, national ($,
#, @), or special characters; enclose a serial number that contains special
characters, other than hyphens, in apostrophes. If the number is shorter than 6
characters, it is padded with trailing blanks.
Perhaps the presumption of leading zero pad comes from an unspecified
middleware ISV product, given the modal belief that volume serials are
decimal numbers.
Be careful. Elsewhere, about a dozen "special" characters are enumerated.
Anything else is "invalid". But this is not validated. (My information may be
outdated.)
Long ago, about the boundary between MVS/SP 1.3 and MVS/XA, a cow-orker
was doing some empirical research about not what the document says is valid
('AB CDE' seems to be valid if blank is a valid special character; 'Ab Cde' is
invalid.), but what a rogue customer might code. He discovered:
o Nearly anything coded in JCL between apostrophes is accepted as valid,
regardless what TFM asserts.
o But some things cause bizarre results; not syntax errors, but unexpected
errors in system code. We conjectured that some prefix of "invalid"
characters was used to denote that the remainder of the volser was either
a control block address or an exit address to which the supervisor branched
without validation.
I hope this sort of cruft has been cleaned up lately.
...
Start of change You can code a maximum of 255 volume serial numbers on a DD
statement. The maximum number of volume serial numbers for a VSAM or
SMS-managed data set is 59. End of change
Awww, c'mon. What ever became of good ol' fashion' revision bars?
-- gil
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