Certainly sounds theoretically useful. FTP struck me as the more useful 
initially, but any of the forms might be useful. You would need the ability to 
specify FTP options like binary and RDW -- and space SITE options for output. 

Charles

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of John McKown
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2014 2:01 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: YASI: QSAM via URL.

YASI -> Yet Another Strange Idea.

This idea is the illegitimate offspring from learning the R language and 
thinking about z/OS UNIX. And, like many others from this source, may well be 
really stupid. But I don't know the meaning of the word fear! And many other 
words too for that matter.

A legacy program can read or write a z/OS UNIX file via QSAM via a normal DD 
statement by using the PATH= instead of DSN=. Now, think of a browser. Most 
browsers can read a web site by using a URL prefixed with http:// or https://. 
But most can also access other protocols by using, for example, ftp:// or 
file:// . The R language, and likely others, can also use these prefixes where 
a file name is normally found. RFC 1738 (and likely others) talks about URLs:
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

I really wonder if this would be of any use in a z/OS environment.

//INPUT DD URL='file:///etc/resolv.conf'
or
//INPUT DD URL='http://some.web.site/download/filedata.txt'
or
//INPUT DD URL='ftp://user:password@host/download/filedata.txt'

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