Oh no! My panel of experts disagrees. > unless you tell it which user cat to look in, which largely negates my purpose
Tell it when? A "batch JCL" time? Then yes, that largely negates the purpose. Or at "define the alias" time? Something like DEFINE ALIAS ... CATALOG(MASTER). That would be okay. I just want a batch job to be able to say //STEPLIB DD DISP=SHR,DSN=JOEBLOW.MY.FOO.BAR and have it load programs from SYS1.FOOBAR. Isn't that what aliases are for? I guess you are saying "aliases are not system-wide -- they are intra-catalog aliases." Okay, well I guess I am learning something about catalogs. What about @Lizette's SYMBOLICRELATE? Will that bridge catalog to catalog? Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Monday, August 29, 2016 3:55 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Elementary dataset alias question On Mon, 29 Aug 2016 15:34:59 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: > >Is it possible to create a catalog entry such that JOEBLOW.MY.FOO.BAR >is an alias for SYS1.FOOBAR and batch DD references to >JOEBLOW.MY.FOO.BAR will actually allocate SYS1.FOOBAR? > No. Well, only if JOEBLOW and SYS1 identify the same user catalog, which is vanishingly unlikely. Catalog always searches for the RELATED DSN in the same catalog in which it found the alias. Well, unless you tell it which user cat to look in, which largely negates my purpose, and probably yours, for wanting an ALIAS I have whined bitterly about this in these pages. It seems to me that once catalog has found the ALIAS which identifies the RELATED it should begin the search anew to find the RELATED. People who claim to know more about this than I say that if that were done you wouldn't be able to IPL, or spacetime would collapse into a black hole, or something. I firmly believe that's only because it's done wrong. BTW, why is an alias for a non-VSAM data set called ALIAS but an alias for a VSAM data set is called PATH? It seems to me they should be interchangable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
