Sometimes you end up in a situation where you use a command or utility and think that the whole world knows about it. One day somebody looked over my shoulder and noticed my use of the ISPF command RETP. He immediately exclaimed: "How did you do that. That was clever.". Now I will tell you about RETP since it isn't the well known command I once thought it was.

RETP is an extension of RETRIEVE (recall last used command) and shows you a pop-up panel with the last X commands used. You can then enter a number corresponding to one of the commands shown to you. When you press Enter this command will be recalled. The value of X depends on the size of the recall buffer and the length of each command entered. The size of the recall buffer is an installation parameter of ISPF and can be changed, but it is the same for all users of ISPF. You have to be pretty convincing to make your ISPF systems programmer change this size.

In the pop-up panel you can control an option that belongs to your ISPF only. It is the length of the commands you want to be able to recall. Commands shorter than the length specified will not be saved in the recall buffer. It is a good idea to set this option to more than 1 as it is much faster to type in a short command that it is to recall it. How much more than 1 is totally up to you.