Gil, So that's what "rm -rf *" really means!! :-)
I agree that it feels the same, but fortunately it doesn't work quite the same. Here are a couple samples I tried on a 1.10 sandbox. There is 1 dataset that matches the filter. Fortunately (although sometimes I wish it would work...) IDCAMS isn't quite so free as to just do what you tell it without questioning - unlike the afore-mentioned "read manual" command... Dataset that I really don't care about.... T05.AGC.ZAG088C.AGCYLST.SORT Test 1: DEL T05.AGC* IDC3203I ITEM 'T05.AGC*' DOES NOT ADHERE TO RESTRICTIONS Test 2: DEL T05.AGC.* IDC3012I ENTRY T05.AGC. NOT FOUND Test 3: DEL T05.AGC.** IDC3203I ITEM 'T05.AGC.**' DOES NOT ADHERE TO RESTRICTIONS Test 4: DEL T05.AGC.*.*.* IDC3203I ITEM 'T05.AGC.*.*.*' DOES NOT ADHERE TO RESTRICTIONS Test 5: DEL T05.AGC.ZAG088C.AGCYLST.* IDC0550I ENTRY (A) T05.AGC.ZAG088C.AGCYLST.SORT DELETED Running an "rm -rf" against the IDCAMS manual brings up the following description of using wildcards: entryname is the name of the entry to be deleted. A generic name can be coded to delete multiple entries with one entryname. (For example, GENERIC.*.BAKER is a generic name where * is any 1-to-8 character simple name.) Here is an example of how generic level DELETE works given the following data sets: 1) AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD 2) AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD 3) AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD.EEE 4) AAA.BBB.CCC DELETE AAA.* results in the deletion of no data sets. DELETE AAA.BBB.* results in the deletion of data set #4 DELETE AAA.BBB.*.DDD results in the selection of data sets #1 and #2 DELETE AAA.BBB.*.DDD.EEE results in the deletion of data set #3. When a generic level name is specified, only one qualifier can replace the asterisk (*). If you are deleting a member of a non-VSAM partitioned data set, the entryname must be specified in the format: pdsname(membername). If you are deleting a non-VSAM data set that was defined by coding DEVICETYPES(0000) and VOLUMES(******), then DELETE only uncatalogs the data set. It does not scratch the data set from the SYSRES volume. Exception: If data set contains indirect or symbolic VOLSER, the scratch parameter will be ignored, if specified. So one cannot delete all members of a PDS via a wildcard IDCAMS run, nor will it replace multiple qualifiers with a single asterisk, nor part of a qualifier with an asterisk. Rex -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 11:02 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: REXX to delete all members of a PDS... serverpac CPPEDELM On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:42:11 -0500, Mark Pace wrote: >I believe you need to remove the parens (). > >DELETE MY.PDS* > Why does this feel similar to instructing a UNIX novice to use the "Read Manual - Really Fast!" command, "rm -rf *"? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
