For humor, rather than technical...

I had a bunch of DMPCLPGM splfs on one system, all from the same job, that I wanted to send to another system. SNDTCPSPLF was the obvious choice, but I was irritated at having to run the command for each individual splf. I started going through the parms in detail, hoping to find some combination of values that would send all of them at once.

The JOBSYSNAME() parameter caught my eye... I'd never needed it before, so I hit [F1] to see if it might be useful.

Interesting [help] text. Not necessarily 'helpful', but interesting.

It starts this way:

"
Job system name (JOBSYSNAME) - Help

Specifies the system from which the job that created the spooled file was ran on.
"

I read that a few times, trying to make sure I understood it. Not being sure, I read farther to see what the special values meant. The first (the default) is *ONLY:

"
*ONLY

One spooled file from the job with the specified job name, user name, job number, spooled file create date and spooled file create time. If *ONLY is specified and more than one spooled file has the specified information listed above, an error message is sent.
"


Well, THAT didn't make it any clearer. So, on to the next one -- *CURRENT:

"
*CURRENT

The job on the current system with the specified job name, user name, job number, spooled file create date and spooled file create time.
"


Hmmm... still a little vague. The only other listed value is a 'name':

"
name

Specify the name of the system where the job ran that created the spooled file.
"


Ah! Okay, so the deal is that I _might_ have a bunch of spooled files on a system, all of which _might_ have come from various other systems and _might_ have the same job names, users, numbers, create dates/times, etc., but that would have different originating systems...

Since the [help] was the same on V5R3 as it is on the V6R1 system that I checked, I take it that this parm is either rarely/never used or that everyone who uses it understands it easily. Apparently, no one has complained about it before.

One side element that I noticed is that a bug with DMPCLPGM from ILE CL has _finally_ been fixed in V6R1. Ever since ILE CL came out, an extra page-break would be generated after the second header line on a page. This caused dump output to print on twice as many pages as were needed.

Good to know that fixes do eventually get made.

Tom Liotta