I'm all in favor of the RFE in principle, but I think that choice of keyword is crucial. Based on decades of history: what happens in JCL stays in JCL. Forever.
I personally find the OMVS keywords unintuitive and therefore--unless one uses them frequently--deucedly difficult to keep straight. In the ancient NDM (ancestor of Connect:Direct) 'REPLACE' is used in the sense suggested by Gil: if it exists, overwrite it; otherwise create it; copy the data and move on with no muss and no fuss. There are other possible values, but REPLACE seems to be available in JCL. Old farts may remember the advent of 'REUSE' in the TSO ALLOCATE command. The lengths we had to go to before REUSE move me to nominate the old mechanism as the single worst design point of MVS. At least the one that impinged on users in the most annoying manner. Time for an innovation in JCL. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW robin...@sce.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Friday, June 30, 2017 11:38 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: (External):Re: Possible RFE for new DISP JCL parameter options On Fri, 30 Jun 2017 11:24:18 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: >YES!!! > >Years ago I wrote and my company sold a mainframe-PC file transfer >product (in the pre-FTP days), and it supported a DISP operand for the >creation of mainframe datasets that worked exactly as you describe, >with two steps under the covers. I'm trying to remember the keyword for the >specification. >Perhaps CREATE. It made sense then (1989) and it makes sense today. > Many desktop editors call this REPLACE; SAVE fails for an existing file. >(It also did a kind of extended SDB under the covers. You could specify >any one or two of LRECL, RECFM and BLKSIZE and it would intuit the >others. Had an algorithm that made intelligent guesses. Specify >RECFM=FB,BLKSIZE=8000 it would give you LRECL=80. Specify >LRECL=137,BLKSIZE=8000 and it would give you RECFM=VB.) > What might it do for RECFM=FB,BKLSIZE=10640 (which happens to be 133 * 80). 526 $ factor 10640 Factors of 10640 are 2 2 2 2 5 7 19 It's ambiguous for any number with 2 or more prime factors. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
