While I was at the Power Systems Technical University in London a couple of weeks ago, a conference attendee in my work management presentation asked me this question: “How do I make WRKJOB, option 14 (display open files), display the I/O information rather than the activation group information? I always have to press F11 to see the I/O details.”
I had to ask a couple colleagues in Rochester, and as it turns out, support has been available to meet this request; you just need to know the super-secret control to change the behavior.
Some of you may be familiar with this – years and years ago, when ILE was first added to the system, the display open files option was changed to initially display the scoping (activation group) information. User requests to change the behavior to display the I/O details first were immediately received; it used to be that you had to install a specific PTF (that was never put in the cumulative PTF group) to change the default behavior, and IBM created a new PTF for each release. Starting with V5R1, IBM changed the implementation to eliminate the need to create a PTF for each new release.
You simply need to create a data area, which is an indicator to the system to display the I/O details first. The create data area command string to use is below:
CRTDTAARA DTAARA(QUSRSYS/QDMDSPOFIO) TYPE(*LGL) LEN(1) AUT(*USE)
Once you create the data area, WRKJOB option 14 (or WRKJOB OPTION(*OPNF)) will now display the I/O details first. Delete the data area and scoping information will be displayed first.
If you are on the IBM i 7.3 release, there was an enhancement to the display open files option on WRKJOB. There is now an additional panel to display the text description of each open file. It’s displayed when you press F11 one additional time. A requirement was received through the COMMON America’s Advisory Council (CAAC) asking for this support.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.