IBM Mainframe Forum

There is sometimes an art to reading IBM manuals. And sometimes they are just dumb.

ISPC045E: Error. Line 51 of file "datasetnamenotrelevant".
Unable to format data. Reason code was "16".

This is from a recent thread. You look up the message, there is no indication of what possible Reason Code's there are or what they might mean and the message is "self-explanatory". Looking further, even the Line number is suspect. Is this the least helpful error message ever?

Elsewhere, doing a VSAM backup to an unlabelled tape. The manual says you can do it and it can be multi-volume. However, when you look at restore, it says you can do it, but only for a single volume. (this was VSE a long time ago, don't know if still true).

I used to love something in the JCL index. I tried looking up "Backward Reference", I found it, it said "see Reference, Backward".

I'm sure this can't be all of them.

My favorite message of all time came out of IEHMOVE: DATASET NOT MOVED/COPIED BECAUSE NOT MOVED/COPIED.

A footnote from "IBM Enterprise COBOL Version 4 Release 2 Performance Tuning"

"WHEN-COMPILED is a literal that is used whenever it is needed."

Anything funny from you PL/X'0001' guys?

z/OS V1R4 MVS System Messages, Vol. 8, message IEF121A:

System Action: The system fails the job with an abend 05C reason code 231 and takes a dump.

(By V1R9 at the latest, IBM had changed this.)