We recently upgraded to 1.13.  Today, I ran afoul of:

From:

    z/OS UNIX System Services
    Command Reference
    Document Number SA22-7802-14

    
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/BPXZA5C0/SHCMDDES.FILE.6

    SHCMDDES.FILE.6

    Files

    file uses the following file:

    /etc/magic
        Default system magic file.

    For file to work, you need to copy the magic file from the /samples
    directory to the /etc directory.

    For more information about enabling file, see the section on copying
    configuration files in z/OS UNIX System Services Planning. Additional
    information about the magic file can be found in "magic -- Format of
    the /etc/magic file" in topic MGC.

Have you ever bought a car that you had to install the
tires yourself before it would work?

Apparently this requirement is well known among coloro che sanno
of OMVS systems programmers.  Ours is mandolinisto; he's overburdened
with other stuff.

Presumably this is to avoid regressing user mods to members of /etc.
But there's a way to deal with this.  Years ago I took a class in SMP/E
software maintenance (Amdahl taught it).  One of the exercises was
to APPLY a USERMOD then attempt to APPLY service that conflicted with
the USERMOD.  It failed.  RESTORE the USERMOD; APPLY the PTF; then
re-APPLY the USERMOD.  Why is /etc/magic not handled this way?
(I'm confident that we have no user mods to that file.)

(Of course, this would work a lot better if SMP/E supported patch(1)
as a utility for maintaining OMVS text files, even as it supports IEBUPDTE
for maintaining legacy text files.)

-- gil

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to