Well, super, guys, thanks. As you can tell I am kind of shell-naive. Much of my "UNIX" experience is writing z/OS C++ programs where pretty much any file can be /unix or //DD:MVSDD or //MVS.DATA.SET or //VSAM.FILE so I kind of proceeded as though all of UNIX was like that. Lesson noted. I know just enough shell to be almost dangerous.
Much like in @Phil's recent COBOL compiler plaint, a more informative error message would sure be a help. "MVS data sets not supported in this context" would have pointed me in the right direction. (It's not just IBM. I was just on a hotel reservation site where "credit card not valid" turned out to mean "the room you requested is not available on that night.") After I saw @Gil's reply I got to thinking the answer was a pipe to cp but thanks for confirming and giving me the syntax -- I would have had to wade through a VERY long doc page. >HTH Very much. Thanks again, Charles. On Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:35:21 +0000, Farley, Peter <[email protected]> wrote: >Gil is correct, only Unix utilities that use the underlying C function >“fopen(…)” can read or write "//'userid.TEMP.OUT2'". Since shell redirection >means the writing program is the shell itself (/bin/sh) and that program does >NOT support MVS datasets directly, you cannot do that. > >Some Unix utilities like “awk” do in fact directly support MVS datasets as >input or output, BUT it is NOT documented to do so (as gil has rightly said >several times when I have brought up this “awk” behavior), so letting any >important work depend on that observed-but-not-documented fact could be risky. > >Instead, you could try to pipe your command output to the “cp” command (which >IS documented to support MVS datasets) and tell “cp” to write to >"//'userid.TEMP.OUT2'" like this: > >(your command(s) here) | cp - "//'userid.TEMP.OUT2'" > >The first operand to “cp” of “-“ (minus sign or hyphen) tells “cp” to use >stdin as the input source and the second operand "//'userid.TEMP.OUT2'" as the >output destination. > >HTH > >Peter ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
