ISPF Commands

There are far too many ISPF commands available to list. What follows is a brief description of some of the most useful, or the most recently added features that I didn’t have space to include before.
PANELID and MSGID are two features available for many years in ISPF, and are especially useful for anyone doing [...]

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ISPF Systems Programmers Tips and Tricks

TSO
Here are some more keystroke-saving techniques you can incorporate into your own style of interaction with the mainframe. The TSO command parser is highly efficient and can determine the command you wish to use from a minimum number of characters needed to uniquely identify the command.
Many TSO commands also have short versions as an alternative [...]

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ISPF Tricks

In my extensive experience working in the mainframe space, I’ve come up with some ISPF tricks over the years that I would like to share. Whether they’re useful to you is, obviously, up to you to decide.
Before going forward, a quick note about using ISPF CMD(xxx) is in order. I’ve found that using CMD(xxx) as [...]

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Assign separate name for temporary dataset

There are some mainframe jobs needs to be submitted in bulk mode. There is a requirement to put the jobname in the generated temp dataset name. They all use the exact same skeleton JCL, including the same DSN=&&SB250DD1 DD statement.  This would be more helpful to avoid the ENQ conflicts
//GENER   EXEC PGM=IEBUPDTE,PARM=NEW
//SYSPRINT DD  DUMMY
//SYSUT2 [...]

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Fact about ISPF dataset edit

 I was going through all the files associated with one of my TSO IDs and
I found a number of ISPF Backup datasets that have been archived.
How or why would these get orphaned (if they have been archived, I
consider them orphaned)? The format of the names is:
userid.ISRnnnnn.BACKUP which matches the format for current edit backup
datasets (I’m [...]

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