When programmers are put in a situation to develop and deploy applications for a new environment, they tend to look for familiar tools to use. An example might be a text editor that is similar to something that has been used in the past. Another example might be the command line environment (sometimes referred to as a “shell”) such as Bash in the Unix/Linux world. IBM provides QShell on the System i as a basic command line environment. However, if you are accustomed to the Unix/Linux world, a lot of utilities that you may be used to may be missing.

As far as I know, nothing disastrous has ever come of a truncation error in one of my programs. Nevertheless, I’m embarrassed when someone points out that a total figure does not equal the sum of the column of numbers above it. RPG’s EVAL opcode generates a hard error if high-order numeric truncation occurs. We can use the MONITOR opcode to trap EVAL’s truncation errors. But what about all those programs that use antique op codes like ADD, SUB, MULT, and DIV?

You can easily make those op codes raise errors upon truncation. Let’s see how it’s done. Here’s an

You should adjust your focus in your article on retrieving system storage space. The first step in dealing with critical storage errors is not to clear up past problems. The first step is to understand where the space is being used now. The Retrieve Disk Information command and the Print Disk Information command are valuable in finding storage hogs, particularly in the Integrated File System (IFS). Maybe you should explore this possibility, too.

–Rob

Not being familiar with the Retrieve Disk Information (RTVDSKINF) and Print Disk Information (PRTDSKINF) commands, I decided to run these commands on my system and