Talk:IBM mainframe utility programs

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[edit] Rearranged

I re-arranged this article a bit today.

  • moved ICKDSF into the "System Utilities" category. There seemed no reason to give this one its own category, especially as it is a rather obscure utility.
  • moved IDCAMS into the "Dataset Utilities" category. There seemed no point to having a special category for VSAM utilities, when this is the only item in the category. And labeling it 'VSAM' isn't accurate: it isn't just for VSAM files; it works fine for non-VSAM datasets also. T-bonham (talk) 09:42, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Did some more changes today.

I added a prologue giving a bit of history on these utilities, and including a list of the common DDs used in them.
Then I removed information about these DDs, that was duplicated in the section for each utility. I only left info that was different & specific to a utility.
I also removed stuff that was just common JCL info, such as statements that EXEC stepnames could be any name, or that DDs could be in any order within a step. This stuff is already covered in the article on Job Control Language.
Also some minor reformatting like making use of Wiki lists, and putting all the examples in < pre > boxes. T-bonham (talk) 08:39, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] IEFBR15

I removed IEFBR15 from this page yesterday. Despite its name, it isn't an IBM utility program, any more than the ISPF PDS-compression hack that was generally known as "IKJJB007" was part of TSO. Somebody just named it that way. Tcb restored it today, saying "IEFBR15 is utility program. It doesn't shipped by IBM but it can be compiled and used on IBM mainframe system." By that logic, every assembler program ever written is a utility program, but as any old-time sysprog can tell you, there was a specific list (which reminds me, I need to add IEHDASDR and the others).

This article is about the MVS utility programs - it's called IBM mainframe utility programs and it starts "IBM Mainframe Utility Programs are supplied with IBM mainframe operating systems such as MVS to carry out various tasks associated with datasets etc." - and IEFBR15 isn't one of them. So I've removed the IEFBR15 entry again, and it should stay gone. It still has it's own page, at (of course!) IEFBR15. RossPatterson 01:01, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use of SORT/MERGE utility (in JCL)

Deleted. Wikipedia is not a tutorial board.T-bonham (talk) 00:27, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] updates

I added a divider before the linker & COBOL compiler sections, to clarify that these are not utilities supplied with the OS. I called them "support programs"; not sure if that is the best wording. Any suggestions?

Also, I made a few changes in those items:

  • Clarified that the linker works with an object deck from any language, not just COBOL.
  • Clarified that this is just the current COBOL compiler, there have been many others over the years.

T-bonham 02:55, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] IEBUPDTE

The previous version seemed to imply that IEBUPDTE came from the UNIX patch utility. Which is ridiculous, since that was written 20 years after IEBUPDTE! So I rewrote it to clarify that. Also fixed the link to go directly to UNIX patch instead of UNIX in general. T-bonham 00:36, 4 August 2007 (UTC)