In the MVS System Commands manual I see

parameters
Program parameters passed to the started program. This might be a list in
parentheses or a string in single quotation marks.

It does not specifically mention blanks, but it does mention quotation
marks.

Charles


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of Peter Relson
Sent: Friday, July 8, 2022 9:29 AM
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


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