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Pulling Information from the SMP/E GLOBAL Zone
SMP/E is IBM's System Maintenance Program. In the more recent versions of
SMP/E, an API is provided which will extract information from the CSI
datasets. The quick and dirty method described below relies on undocumented
interfaces, so it comes with no guarantees.
The SMP/E global zone is a keyed VSAM dataset where the key identifies
the zone, the entry type and entry name. Multiple records are used for each
entry; one record usually appears for most useful types of subentry. This
means by extracting records with the right offset, you can extract information
not easily found from the GLOBAL zone.
For instance, the JCL below:
<![CDATA[
//S1 EXEC SORT
//SORTIN DD DISP=SHR,DSN=global.csi,
// AMP=('BUFND=12','BUFNI=4')
//SORTOUT DD SYSOUT=*,LRECL=80,RECFM=F
//SYSIN DD *
INCLUDE COND=(17,7,CH,EQ,C'AW32759')
OUTREC FIELDS=(5,8,4X,17,7,61X)
SORT FIELDS=COPY
//
]]>
could be used to pull off SYSMODS from the GLOBAL zone that refer to APAR
AW32759 using the SORT utility. This would usually mean either PREing or
SUPing PTFs or HOLDERROR entries. This is one method for determining if
a PTF exists on site for solving a specified problem.
This method could also be used with MODULE names to find out if any
PTFs in the GLOBAL zone update a specified module. You could also change
the SORT control statements to scan for references to MODULE names that
start with a given prefix.
SMP/E is a trademark of IBM Corporation.
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