John McKown wrote:

>YASI -> Yet Another Strange Idea.

Ah, YASA (Yet Another Strange Acronym!) ;-D


>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=. 

Define 'legacy'. That is a dirty word for me. I don't really like it 'they' say 
mainframe is 'legacy'. :-[

With quotes and with upper/lower case taken in account, it should not be a PITA.


>I really wonder if this would be of any use in a z/OS environment.
>//INPUT DD URL='file:///etc/resolv.conf'
>//INPUT DD URL='http://some.web.site/download/filedata.txt'
>//INPUT DD URL='ftp://user:password@host/download/filedata.txt'

It would be useful if you used it in READ mode, but then the files must be in 
the right format. I'm just a little uneasy about write mode (see below).


>and so on. It might even be interesting if someone would create a "CURL" 
>subsystem which could do the above. This could be modeled after the cURL 
>ported command.

>Well, back into my hole for a time.

No, come back! That is an order! :-)

Before you go hiding and leaving all of us , tell me how are we all going to 
apply *proper* security on these cURL objects?

What about translating domain names into IP addresses? Metadata? Firewalls? 
RACF SERVAUTH profiles? ASCII / EBCDIC translation? Codepages, etc?

If RACF for example allows it, how will the machine which hosts those remote 
files, react on such requests? Perhaps with 200 (hopefully), or with 404 or 403 
results?

If RACF is the deciding authority, will it honor the contents of 'robots.txt'? 
[1] 

Now you may go back to your hole. And I'm hiding under my rock. ;-)

Groete / Greetings
Elardus Engelbrecht

[1] - Sample contents, this one simply disallow all and everything including 
subfolders too:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

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