The fourth positional parameter of START has been around since the early days of OS/360; the documentation mentions parentheses but not apostrophes as framing characters.
Separately, what are the SDSF rules for / when the command operand contains a space, e.g., to enter the command F FOO,'BAR BAZ', is it / F FOO,'BAR BAZ', or / 'F FOO,''BAR BAZ'''? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Peter Relson [rel...@us.ibm.com] Sent: Friday, July 8, 2022 12:28 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: How do I issue a command with a blank in it? You generalize at your own risk. The subject of the post is very general, and the processing likely differs across commands. And might even vary depending on how you issue the command (e.g., operator console, SDSF, mgcre). This might be a "how do I issue any command with a blank in it, using SDSF" question. This might be a "how do I issue a start command with a blank in it, using SDSF" question. This might be a "how do I issue a start command with the parameter having a blank" question. Many system commands do not terminate upon finding blank. I'd expect that SDSF would not terminate any input that is provided but would provide all the input text to the system (including comments). I'll assume that this is really just a question about "start" and that SDSF is not getting in the way. Regarding the initial post, most programs would prefer not having to use QEDIT to access the parameter data (that's how you access the parameter specification via the 4th positional parameter of Start). I was thinking that a parameter of (COLINs,Data) might have sort of worked but that uses the commas, not blanks in between, and would upper-case both so passing COLINS,DATA to the program (to be extracted by QEDIT. If your proc provides parameters to the program via PARM= this all would work as you desire. It appears that the parsing for the 4th positional parameter of the START command does not support quotes as special characters. That is not documented but can/should be. And maybe it should be enhanced to support them. Do a lot of you use the START command with the 4th positional parameter? I'll admit that I didn't even know that you could do this. Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
