A Handy Tip for Testing Batch Job Streams

February 21, 2007 Ted Holt

Recently, I had to make some changes to a job stream that had a lot of hard-coded output queue names. Even though I was able to use a test system that was a copy of the production system, some of those OUTQs were live. The OUTQ for the fax server is a prime example. Holding the OUTQs for extended periods of time was not practical. Neither were holding or stopping the writers. Fortunately, there was an easy way to test the job stream without distributing the spooled output.

I started another green-screen session just for the test. Before calling the program, I issued the following override command from a CL command line.

OVRPRTF FILE(*PRTF) HOLD(*YES) OVRSCOPE(*JOB)

The special value *PRTF in the FILE parameter matches any file name. Even though the reports were generated under a lot of file names, all of them were created on hold status.

This technique does not work if the job stream submits other jobs to batch, since overrides do not carry over from one job to another.

Short, but sweet.

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