Get a Hex Dump of

October 30, 2002 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Dear Readers:

Today’s tip proves the old saying, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Here’s another way to view any database file member or IFS file in hexadecimal.

— Ted

CL’s Display File (DSPF) command displays any IFS file or database file member.

To display an IFS file, use the STMF parameter:

DSPF STMF('/home/mydir/mydata.dat')

Press F10 to see the file in hexadecimal.

You can specify a path name and/or wildcard characters in the STMF parameter.

In that case, DSPF provides a list of files from which you can choose.

This command lists all files and directories in directory /home/mydir:

DSPF STMF('/home/mydir')

This command lists files whose names start with the letter t:

DSPF STMF('/home/mydir/t*')

DSPF does not give you as many possibilities as Qshell’s od command, which I presented in the October 18 issue of Midrange Guru .

To use DSPF to display a database file member, use the FILE and MBR parameters. The MBR parameter defaults to *FIRST:

DSPF FILE(MYLIB/MYFILE) MBR(MYMBR)

For viewing database files, I prefer the good ol’ reliable Display Physical File Member (DSPFFM) command:

DSPPFM FILE(MYLIB/MYFILE) MBR(MYMBR)        

Press F10 to view the data in hexadecimal format. The hexadecimal data will be displayed to the right of the character data. If you want to see the hexadecimal data under the character data, press F10, then F11.

— Ted

Sponsored By ADVANCED SYSTEMS CONCEPTS

Business Analytics – Practical – – Cost Effective – – Easy to Deploy – SEQUEL FYI User Quote: “I love SEQUEL FYI because it lets me look at the data any way I need to see it, instantly. This is the easiest tool to manage complex product relationships that I have ever seen.” SEQUEL FYI offers outstanding OLAP business intelligence functionality for a fraction of the cost of comparable solutions. Read More > View Streaming Video