The summer is slowly approaching and I feel a little lazy. Therefore the tip of the week is a short one about line command SS in SYSVIEW. I am a huge fan of SDSF, but most installations I work on has installed and uses SYSVIEW instead. Thus I am forced to use SYSVIEW, which is a tool with many more capabilities than SDSF if you have the right authorizations.

One command I feel confident that everybody is authorized to in SYSVIEW and which I have not seen in SDSF is the line command SS. SS is used on the Job Summary view for all types of jobs both on the input queue, during execution and when they have finished. SS is an abbreviation of Step Summary and displays a view showing one line for each step in the job including steps in JCL procedures. For each step you can see whether it is waiting for execution, is being executed or which return code it has finished with. The view largely corresponds to the displayed information in the top of the job output on most installations.

The good thing about SS is that you can get an overview of the steps in your job already in the input queue and that it is far easier to follow the progress of the execution of the job if it consists of many steps.