Re: Search OS/400 Physical Files

Pete had alluded to a goal of finding a string "trying to reverse engineer some 3rd party apps." [I noticed right after I replied, that I had snipped that; oops]; possibly a bit unlike the Subject line and text from the OP. An assumption that searching database data would suffice, seemed a bit limited. As such the DASD search was actually offered in full sincerity, albeit with the assumption that the idea would likely be dismissed without so much as an inquiry. /Easy/ enough to self-teach by creating a file.mbr with a row at the end of over 16MB of data, where the row data has a string very likely to be unique. Dump the dataspace and use the search utility; use the details of the dump to [try to learn to] navigate, after the string is located. Given the data were stored instead in either an associated space or another object type, alternate techniques and similar learning. But if such a search is performed and found or not found, can help determine if learning or doing more might have any value.

Regards, Chuck

vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Chuck you got me rolling on the floor with this one! Trouble is, I love doing this kind of thing!

Now how many civilians know that a context is the MI name for a library!!

And I know I've forgot where the pointers to everything are
- figured it out once when I was contracted at IBM in 2001.
Had to see what was actually happening with auxiliary spaces
and the AXENT stuff. (Just showing off a little - heh!)

CRPence wrote:

Given a sufficiently [presumed to be effectively] unique string to be searched, the STRSST D/A/D find function for an address range could be used to scan the DASD for such data. For occurrences found, visit the base segment address to determine if it is a dataspace segment, then find its owning dataspace object, owning member, and then its context.
Pete Hall wrote:

Well, the other day, I needed to find a table that contained a particular ID. Something like: grep "ABC123456789" * Is it possible to do something like that in qsys.lib? Assume the database tables have an unknown schema, and there are a bunch of them. <<SNIP>>