Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi all,

I have a requirement to find the members present in PDS which are atleast 4 months old. Could someone give me some pointers on how to achieve this?

Depending upon the PDS, it may not be possible -- period. If the PDS does not contain load modules, and the PDS does not have ISPF statistics set then there is NOTHING to tell you the age of the PDS member, hence it would not be possible to determine the age of any member. A load module has a date / time stamp in it but it can be a problem to get to it, especially if you want to use a program. If the PDS has ISPF statistics, you can read the PDS directory to retrieve those statistics and they contain the date the member was added as well as the last date it was changed.

Hi Robert,
Thanks, Yes my PDS has ISPF statistics .

So I have 2 questions
1.How to print the stats to a dataset ?
2.How to find the difference between the date present under Modify date and current date in REXX?

You can print the statistics via ISPF 3.4, or you can directly read the PDS directory to retrieve the statistics. How to do this in REXX, I do not know since I don't write a lot of REXX. I did write a COBOL program a while back to read ISPF statistics from a PDS.

read the ispf manuals about the LM.... services
in this case the LMMSTATS will return the ISPF members stats
the DATE rexx function will help You to calculate the difference between the dates

Hi Enrico and Robert,
Thanks all

Yeah.. I made use of the LMMSTATS and then used the REXX date function to find difference in dates

Can you please post the code or algo which worked for you, it'll help me as I'm looking for a smilar solution.