ISPF/TSO tips

• PANELID ON will show the panel name in the top left corner
• PFSHOW ON will show the PF Keys assignment at the bottom of the screen
• You are editing a PDS (partitioned dataset) member; you've made significant number of changes to the member; now you are thinking about creating a new member with these changes rather than saving the changes in the member you are editing. Can you do this? Yes, you can. Just issue this command: CRE .ZF .ZL memname. And, don't forget to issue CANCEL command on the member that you are editing, otherwise, you might save the changes accidentally (if AUTOSAVE is turned ON in your ISPF profile)
• Talking of ISPF profile, how will you know what are all the options available and which are turned on/off? Issue PROF on a dataset while in VIEW or EDIT mode.
• C ALL 'abc' 'xyz' will replace all occurrences of string abc to xyz
• C ALL 'abc' 'xyz' n will replace all occurrences of string abc to xyz in column n
• C ALL 'abc' 'xyz' n1 n2 will replace all occurrences of string abc to xyz between columns n1 and n2
• C ALL P'¬' 'abc' n1 n2 will replace ANY character found between columns n1 and n2 to abc. Use this very carefully.
• X ALL 'abc' will exclude all the lines that have the string 'abc'
• COMP X 'dataset(optional_member_name)' will display the differences between current PDS/PS and the compared dataset excluding all the lines that match. This is very useful if you are making changes to a source code and want to compare it with the baseline. There is another powerful feature available along with comparing two datasets. You can bring in the changes found in the compared dataset which is not available in the current dataset. If you would like know how to do this, please send me an email or post a comment