There was a LOT of discussion about PDS member names and also about the PDS command (open source, not from IBM, and it just works).
Here is a snip from one of its tutorial pages that may help. z/OS is *not* unix and has its own standards that we have to learn and live within. It is also flexible enough to allow you to (trigger warning) shoot yourself in both feet and still give you enough rope to hang yourself. But that isn't any different from any other of the more complex operating systems - each has its place and pluses and minuses. P86PN1MN --------------------------- Member Naming ------------------------ OPTION ===> According to IBM standards, member names should begin with an alphabetic or national character and it may be followed with up to seven alphanumeric or national characters. In actual fact, member names in a PDS directory may contain almost any data. You may specify member names with imbedded special characters (example: A<C?23) to PDS but the use of some special characters such as parentheses, commas, blanks, semicolons, asterisks, colons or slashes may cause unexpected results. For this reason and to allow specification of unprintable member names, PDS allows you to enter hexadecimal member names. Lionel B. Dyck <sdg>< Website: <http://www.lbdsoftware.com/> http://www.lbdsoftware.com "Worry more about your character than your reputation. Character is what you are, reputation merely what others think you are." - John Wooden ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
