It is a terrible long time ago I wrote a tip about RACF apart from some assembler code. I have realised that I have not written anything about how you can protect your own datasets. I once wrote about how to give others permission to read all your datasets. You might be interested in giving a more diversified access. For example you might want to give read access to some of your datasets and no access to others.

The most common default access to your datasets is no access. This is acheived by protecting them using a RACF profile. You can display this profile by issuing the command TSO SR (or TSO SEARCH). This command will display all your profiles, but you will typically only have one. Let us now assume that you want to give others some kind of access to some of your datasets (see tip week 52/01), while you still want some privacy for other datasets. These dataset you will call PRIVATE.something, and of course they will be prefixed by your userid.

The easiest way to protect datasets is by using a so-called generic profile. In this example a suitable profile will be named PRIVATE.* which will control the access to all datasets called <userid>.PRIVATE.something. In order to create the RACF-profile and prevent others from accessing the datasets it protects, you issue the command TSO AD PRIVATE.* UACC(NONE) GEN. Using TSO SR you can see that the profile has been created. If you wish to remove the profile again you just issue a TSO DD PRIVATE.*, and gone it is. By the way AD is an abbreviation of ADDSD which is the full name of the command. DD is an abbreviation of DELDSD.