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PRTFBA - A spool to disk copier

The only function of this program is to dump a spool job(s) as a FBA format dataset on disk.

Why would you want to copy jobs from the spooler to an IBM FBA formatted dataset ?, well you may want to send them to an IBM mainframe and keep the page breaks and overtyping etc.

It selects reports by location, so you are able to bundle many jobs off the spooler at the same location into a single FBA format file.

It allows the option holding the job being offloaded rather than deleting the source job as the jobs are copied. Held jobs are skipped by the offload, so changing the source job to held prevents it being re-offloaded later (as does defaulting to delete of course).

This was written by me as a 'proof of concept' while the company I worked for at that time was looking at replacing a file transfer product that did something similar, and they said it just couldn't be done by the in-house developers, so I did it to remind them that sysprogs know how to write code and the world doesn't resolve around developers.
But it's no faster than any commercial product, as the speed limitation is the spooler queries, using documented api's no one tool is going to be faster than any other.
It's available here to show how you can interface with the spooler to query jobs, change the state of jobs, read jobs off the spooler and detect page breaks etc. Nothing new, it's all in the manuals; but here it is all in one place for you.

You may view or download the source code.

Syntax

    add define =prtfba_logfile    , class map, file $0                     
    add define =prtfba_spl_source , class map, file $spls.#report.stuff  
    add define =prtfba_target_file, class map, file $data01.rptdata.stuff
    add define =prtfba_spooler_action, class map, file $HOLD
    run prtfba /name/                                                   

If the =prtfba_spooler_action define is not provided as $HOLD then the default action is to delete the job when it has been offloaded.

The PRTFBA program is free for anyone to download and customise for their own use, as long as it is never included in a commercial package (simply because I don't want someone saying five years from now I can no longer distribute this because they have made it part of a commercial tooolkit).