CA Tuesday Tip: (CA IDMS) IEF642I error trying unpack a pax file

[Edward Gorga]

CA IDMS Tuesday Tip by Edward Gorga, Principal Support Engineer for February 12, 2015

 

Running the following JCL to unpack a pax file may result in error IEF642I EXCESSIVE PARAMETER LENGTH IN THE PARM FIELD

 

//UNPAX    EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,                                          

//         PARM='sh cd /a/userid/H/SMPNTS/SMPPTFIN; pax               X

//               -rvf S0002.USERID.TMPPTF.D15040.T162837.pax.Z'       

//STDOUT   DD SYSOUT=*                                                 

//STDERR   DD SYSOUT=*

 

The reason is the JCL PARM length is limited to 100 characters. The solution is to use JCL SET variables like this:

 

// SET TGT=’/a/myuseird/H/SMPNTS/SMPPTFIN’

// SET PAX=’S0002.MYUSERID.TMPPTF.D15040.T162837.pax.Z’

//UNPAX    EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH,                                          

//         PARM='sh cd &TGT; pax -rvf &PAX'       

//STDOUT   DD SYSOUT=*                                                 

//STDERR   DD SYSOUT=*                                                 

//                                                                    

 

Another option is to move the commands from the PARM statement to an input file called STDPARM. You need to separate each command with a semi-colon (;) but you can extend a command over multiple lines if needed. Here is an example:

 

//UNPAX    EXEC PGM=BPXBATCH                       

//STDOUT   DD SYSOUT=*                             

//STDERR   DD SYSOUT=*                             

//STDPARM  DD *                                    

sh cd /a/myuseird/H/SMPNTS/SMPPTFIN;                

pax -rvf S0002.MYUSERID.TMPPTF.D15040.T162837.pax.Z;

ls -l 

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