Utilities for z/OS

The page contains a collection of useful utilities that we've written, collected, or used over the years. They are shareware and are available free for download.

Filename Description
Using SPF Pro.pdf Dave's favorite editor has been and remains Command Technology's SPF/Pro. Unfortunately, while being quite powerful, it does have the tendency to crash from time to time. Unfortunately, SPF/Pro was orphaned over a decade ago, so there is no hope of it ever being fixed. But there are strategies that mitigate the consequences of its crashes and reduce their frequency to acceptable levels.

A few years ago, Dave wrote an in-house document called "Notes, Comments and Cautions about Using SPF/Pro", We now we are making it available to the public. You can download it here.
asm2zap.zip A utility for converting an assembly listing into SUPERZAP cards.
blksptrk.zip A TSO command that computes and displays track capacities for any IBM DASD device for any BLKSIZE, with or without key fields.
dscopy.trs A flexible program for copying any number of sequential files in a single jobstep.
maclib.zip A set of High Level Assembler macros needed for assembling the various programs available from ColeSoft Marketing. (Last updated 08/10/05).
ZTreeWin One of Dave Cole's favorite utilities for PC. ZTreeWin offers superior PC disk and file management capabilities in a tree-structured format. ZTreeWin features ASA mainframe carriage control character support for printing.

Download and Installation Instructions

  • Click on the above links to download the desired files to your PC.
  • Use PKZIP, WINZIP, ZTreeWin (or similar program) to decompress the files. For those programs that run on the z/OS platform, the decompression process will yield a single file whose extension will be ".XMT" (example: SCHEDRUN.XMT).
  • Upload the xxx.XMT file to your mainframe as a binary file, i.e. with ASCII-to-EBCDIC translation turned OFF. Use IND $FILE, FTP, or your workstation program's File Transfer Facility, to perform the upload. The DCB attributes for the upload file must be RECFM=FB, LRECL=80, BLKSIZE=n*80.
  • Use TSO's RECEIVE command (not to be confused with SMP/E's RECEIVE command) to restore the transmit file into its original PDS library structure as follows:
    • The RECEIVE command will display a message file that you may or may not want to read at this time. (You will have an opportunity to read it later.) The last two messages displayed will be:
      INMR901I Dataset DBCOLE.EXPORT.name from ...
      INMR906A Enter restore parameters or 'DELETE' or 'END' +
      To restore the file just press ENTER. This will cause the library to be restored to a dataset named "prefix.EXPORT.name" where "prefix" is your TSO session's current default high level qualifier for dataset names (usually your userid but can be changed via the PROFILE PREFIX(name) command).
    • If you prefer to restore to a different dsname, then when the INMR906A message is displayed, type DSNAME(name).
    • For information about other possible options accepted by the INMR906A message, type a question mark before pressing ENTER.
  • The restored library will contain a $$DOC member and/or a README member. Read these members for further instructions.