Shell utilities

The following commands are available from the OMVS shell:

man

help on command use. For example, man chmod will show the manual information for the chmod command. man extracts this information from the BookManager books for USS.

grep

find text strings in files. For example, grep -i "string" * will scan all files in the current directory for the specified string. The -i means that the search is case-insensitive.

find

finds files with specified attributes.

diff

find differences between files or directories. diff -s dir1/ dir2/ will compare files in two directories for differences. It identifies files which are only found in one of the two directories.

chmod

change file permission bits. You can also invoke this command from ftp using quote site chmod ... for a single file.

chown

change file owner. This changes the owning uid and/or gid.

mv

move or rename one or more files/ directories.

tso

run a TSO command. Behaviour may vary depending on how you entered the shell environment.

iconv

converts from one character set to another.

nm

displays the symbol table from an executable file.

od

"Octal Dump". Also does hexadecimal dumps.

wall

sends a message to all logged in users.

whence

identifies the location of an executable file.

who

display information about logged in users.

ps

display information about active processes.

strings

show printable text from a file (even an executable).

lp

direct output to spool. See Spooling output from OMVS processes for more information.

I recently made use of the following command:

tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n*" <input.file | grep "string"

Here is another way to do this:

strings input.file | grep "string"

See Taking advantage of the OMVS shell for more information about shell commands.

You can also find information on the web at Functions and Commands for z/OS Unix System Services.