I have a UJV exit that we market which allows you to create variables for BATCH jobs as well as STC's. At our customer sites we use it to control the DSN's of the backups and hundreds of other jobs. The users also take advantage of the capabilities, (the ones that know how to read the manual :)).
You can license ours, or you can download a very similar one from www.cbttape.org/ file 573 that has a few less capabilities (but should be able to do the below), but is free. i.e. // SET BKPDSN='D&ZYEAR.&ZMONTH.&ZDAY..T&ZTIME.' .... //BACKUP00 EXEC PGM=ADRDSSU,REGION=0M //SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=* //DISK0 DD UNIT=3390,DISP=SHR,VOL=SER=FC6C00 //TAPE0 DD UNIT=3480,DISP=(,CATLG),LABEL=(1,SL), // DSN=SYSTAPE.Z13DL1.&BKPDSN,VOL=(,RETAIN,,10) ends up with a DSN (assuming the job runs today at 22:59) of: SYSTAPE.Z13DL1.D110712.T2259 There are literally hundreds (well, maybe "a lot" is a better term) of JCL variables that you can create using the exit and you are not limited to running as a Started Task for any of them. Some people don't like using exits, I personally feel that a good exit is worth it's weight in gold. Eventually IBM will come around and support doing this natively, and (currently) there are a lot of reasons why they can't, but there is no reason you shouldn't do it on your own until then. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
