TSO OGET
So yeah, you’ve heard about this marvelous function in TSO called ‘OGET’. So instead of going ‘online’ to ‘read the docs’ you decide to read the manual straight from your TSO session.....
You type: TSO HELP OGET and are presented with page after page of text. I hate to bring it to you guys at IBM but there’s a little typo there.
Did you spot it too?
If you can’t find the typo, there’s a very simple mehtod to find it :)
If you don’t wanna read all the docs (and hunt for more typos) the TL;DR for using OGET is:
OGET /path/to/file ‘SOME.PDS.OR(MEMBER)’
This will copy the contents of that file into a dataset or member. There are various options to set the “Access mehtod” of the copy operation.
Convert ASCII/EBCDIC with or without custom translate tables, you name it OGET has it all...
Slight caveat might occur when you use the resulting dataset in your JCL. It will most likely be written in variable blocked 251 bytes records.
To circumvent this use a pre-allocated dataset with DCB data to your liking. IEFBR14 seems to be a good program for that (however IEFBR14 is not actually doing the allocation, as this is performed by JES, but that’s something for another time.....)
