Scheduling a Job to Run More than Once a Day

July 24, 2002 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hey, Ted:

I saw your tip in the July 12 issue of Midrange Guru, OS/400 Edition.

I’ve done this for few clients by simply posting multiple entries in the job schedule under slightly different job names. If you have to change the job schedule entries frequently, this might not be such a good idea; my experience has been that once a job is in the scheduler, it rarely changes. I did this for a direct mail company that was running mailing list selections five times a day. Five entries to the job scheduler took care of it nicely.

— Rich

You’re not the only person who suggested using multiple job scheduler entries, Rich. In fact, that’s the solution one of my associates suggested when I began to work up an answer to this question. I suspect that using multiple job scheduler entries is a widely used technique.

However, I also suspect that there are a sizable number of programmers who have never used the SCDDATE and SCDTIME parameters of the Submit Job (SBMJOB) command, and they may not even know those parameters exist.

To solve the problem I presented would require 11 job scheduler entries. I received a similar request from a reader to run a job every 15 minutes all day long. To solve that problem would require 96 job scheduler entries. Not only would all of them have to be changed at once, imagine having to hold them all.

Now readers have two ways of scheduling the same job entry more than once a day–multiple job scheduler entries and SBMJOB’s SCDTIME parameter.

— Ted

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