Practise rexx at home in windows pc

Many of us want to do REXX programing at home. If you want to do REXX programing  in your PC, you need a REXX interpreter. Regina REXX is one such interpreter you can download and use for free.

Example of skeleton JCL

A skeleton JCL or JCL skel is a JCL template that another program can use with certain parameter and create dynamic JCL on the fly. Today I will show how skeletal JCL works with a simple example. Here is one example of skeleton JCL.

Design ISPF panel for REXX tool

Designing a REXX tool with panel is not a tough task. You just need to learn to design ISPF panel and display panel from REXX code and you might also need to know how to use skeleton JCL and submit a job from REXX program.  So to design your REXX tool with panel you need to know following things.

Remove duplicate records without changing record order using SORT JCL

Whenever SORT utility is used for removing duplicates record order gets changed. Many times that is not the desired result. To remove duplicate records without changing record order use below trick. I have shown below example with file having record length 80. That needs to be changed according to file record length you want.

REXX tool for replacing a particular string in all the members of a PDS

CAWABATC tool can be used for replacing a particular string in all the members of a PDS provided CAFM is available in your shop.  However this does not work fine when the target string is longer than source string and the tool overwrites spaces next to the string to be replaced with the new string.

REXX tool to copy all PDS members to PS

Here is how to copy all PDS members to a single dataset.  Find below the REXX code. The tool can be executed both in front end and batch.